Top 100 On Human Nature Quotes
#1. For what is history, but ... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.
Washington Irving
#2. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison
#3. The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
F.H. Bradley
#4. Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Steven Pinker
#5. In [Yogananda's] celebrated Autobiography of a Yogi, he offers a stunning account of the 'cosmic consciousness' reached on the upper levels of yogic practice, and numerous interesting perspectives on human nature from the yogic and Vedantic points of view.
Robert S Ellwood
#6. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of Government. But what is Government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
James Madison
#7. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflection on human nature?
James Madison
#8. My background is in math and science, and I thrive on complexity, and I think lots of people do. People love puzzles; it's human nature to want to solve puzzles.
Michael Loceff
#9. There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.
Gabriel Chevallier
#10. Given is the word. Given publicly, on the first Good Friday, on a hill, in the sight of all, was the visible demonstration of the only permanent way to overcome evil. Human nature demands something more enduring than the unquiet equilibrium of rival powers.
Muriel Lester
#11. On my way out I didn't look at the dark guy, the suicide bomber, again. I think I didn't look at him because I didn't believe he was a terrorist, but maybe I didn't look at him because I didn't want to embarrass him.
Assaf Gavron
#12. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#13. Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
#14. Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.
Rosamund Pike
#15. It is the nature of human that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else.
Robin Hobb
#16. It's human nature to be curious about people, and to be more curious about young people than old people. We want to cheer something on at the same time we want to tear it down. That's just so normal.
Amy Grant
#17. The conservation of nature, the proper care for the human environment and a general concern for the long-term future of the whole of our planet are absolutely vital if future generations are to have a chance to enjoy their existence on this earth
Prince Philip
#18. There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity's control.
J. Meredith Neil
#19. Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.
Brother Lawrence
#20. For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others.
Boleslaw Prus
#21. In ourselves, rather than in material nature, lie the true source and life of the beautiful. The human soul is the sun which diffuses light on every side, investing creation with its lovely hues, and calling forth the poetic element that lies hidden in every existing thing.
Giuseppe Mazzini
#22. We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.
Esther Perel
#23. How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#24. It's human nature to work on ourselves, to get better in mind, body, and spirit, so there's nothing wrong with trying to live life to your fullest potential.
Josh McDermitt
#25. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature
Oscar Wilde
#26. I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.
Murray Rothbard
#27. Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.
William Wordsworth
#28. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
Honore De Balzac
#29. but when you were down, some guys just seemed to feel an urge to walk up your back and plant a foot on your neck instead of helping you to stand. It was lousy, but so much of human nature was.
Stephen King
#30. You're still human and the moment you see someone attractive, you can't help but make note of it. It's human nature. Acting on it is a whole other story and that's where I draw the line.
J.A. Redmerski
#31. Relying on the face might be human nature - even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin.
Paul Bloom
#32. Whether the are splashed with gold or white, striped with chartreuse or cream, or margined in light tones, they are nature's weaklings, and nature is still a matter of survival of the fittest. The survival of variegated plants depends on human intervention.
Allen Lacy
#33. It is human nature to resist change... but yet, it is human nature to be innovative. Humans are contradicitve based on the fact that innovation requires change.
Faith Tilley Johnson
#34. I think I have quite traditional views on original sin, grace, and the real but difficult nature of we humans being able to learn something true about being human that we didn't know before. And yet the consequences of this traditional view are really quite radical.
James Alison
#35. The incarnation of God is a necessity of human nature. If we reap and truly have a Father, we must be able to clasp His feet in our penitence, and to lean on His breast in our weary sorrowfulness.
Charles Deems
#36. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#37. There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
G.K. Chesterton
#38. For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.
James P. Carse
#39. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
John Stuart Mill
#40. Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts.
Clarence Day Jr.
#41. In primary school, there are kids who learn their conjugations and their multiplication tables. Me, I learned something more useful: the strong get off on walking all over other people, and wiping their feet while they're at it, like you would on a doormat.
Marie Sabine Roger
#42. The enterprise of making sense of the material world turns on a key question: what happens when something observed in nature doesn't fit within the established framework of existing human knowledge?
Thomas Levenson
#43. Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.
Philip K. Dick
#44. Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious ... Space is, after all, solid, monolithic ... Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.
Stanislaw Lem
#46. The moth prefers the moon and detests the sun, while the butterfly loves the sun and hides from the moon. Every living creature responds to light. But depending on the amount of light you have inside, determines which lamp in the sky your heart will swoon.
Suzy Kassem
#47. We must not bind our hearts to the things of the world, no matter how beautiful they are or how much pleasure they give us. Our hearts must soar in the heavens for us to be truly the humans we were meant to be.
Aleksandra Layland
#48. Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.
Paul Valery
#49. Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and
destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics.
William T. Cavanaugh
#50. You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.
Joss Whedon
#51. Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#52. I hope you haven't given up on the S.Q.'s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves' clothing. If not for S.Q.'s good nature, we'd never have escaped.
Trenton Lee Stewart
#53. On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.
Laura Hillenbrand
#54. Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
Edward Hall
#55. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.
Paul Kalanithi
#56. The conservative thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.
Russell Kirk
#57. It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#58. Life is ephemeral; each moment passes quickly, a blur of color on a fast moving subway car. There and gone and all we are left with is the imprint of what once was.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
#59. If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#61. One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.
Chris Hondros
#62. We have two natures within us, both struggling for mastery. Which one will dominate us? It depends on which one we feed.
Billy Graham
#63. The poacher works in the woods, and the smuggler in the mountains or on the sea.
The towns make men ferocious because it makes them corrupt.
Mountains, sea, and forest make men reckless. They stir the wildness of men's nature,
but do not necessarily destroy what is human
Victor Hugo
#64. We are to feed the new nature on the Word of God constantly, and we are to starve the old nature, which craves the world and the flesh. We are told to "make not provision for the flesh" [Romans 13:14 KJV].
Billy Graham
#65. Take away human beings from this planet and life would go on, nature would go on in all its loveliness and violence. Where would the problem be? No problem. You created the problem. You are the problem. You identified with "me" and that is the problem. The feeling is in you, not in reality.
Anthony De Mello
#66. Christ died for our sins. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, took upon Himself a human nature and died a horrible death on our behalf. That is the reason for the cross. He suffered what we should have suffered. He died in our place to pay the penalty for our sins.
Jerry Bridges
#67. Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos ... A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing.
John Brunner
#68. Some of the most likeable people on the outside are capable of truly heinous things.
Kenneth Eade
#69. It's human nature to want to keep going, but you have to fight against the "I'm just gonna keep doing it" when you know the possibility of not looking great on the way out.
Nikki Sixx
#70. God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, And, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.
Anonymous
#71. I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
#72. Voting on things is democratic, yes - but not on deciding on whether or not people should be equal or have human rights. That isn't democracy, it is mob rule.
Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy.
Christina Engela
#73. When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
Andrew O'Hagan
#74. Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.
Grove Karl Gilbert
#75. Fire can destroy or purify, strengthen or weaken, all depending on the nature of the material being burned. Pain has the same effects on the human soul, and for the same reasons.
Lance Conrad
#76. As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.
Linda Hogan
#77. Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.
Phyllis Schlafly
#78. Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
Virginia Woolf
#79. None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.
Morris West
#80. Unfortunately, it is human nature for us to only learn and grow from a place of emptiness. It's hard to learn when we are winning and on top of the world.
Yehuda Berg
#82. The evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;
Albert Camus
#83. Belief in non-violence is based on the assumption that human nature in the essence is one and therefore unfailingly responds to the advances of love ...
Mahatma Gandhi
#84. Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment.
Suzy Kassem
#85. i was becoming a sack of vomit and fecal matter. i suppose, on reflection, that that is what i had always been, but nature had not formerly imposed this aspect of the human condition quite so vividly upon me.
Harry F. Saint
#86. Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.
Alexander McCall Smith
#87. How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?
Arundhati Roy
#88. Deep in the human nature, there is an almost irresistible tendency to concentrate physical and mental energy on attempts at solving problems that seem to be unsolvable. Indeed, for some kinds of active people, only the seemingly unsolvable problems can arouse their interest.
Ragnar Frisch
#89. To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.
Edward Thorndike
#90. We are facing a tipping point of environmental crisis unprecedented in human history and our very survival is dependent on protecting nature.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#91. Badgered, snubbed and scolded on the one hand; petted, flattered and indulged on the other-it is astonishing how many children work their way up to an honest manhood in spite of parents and friends. Human nature has an element of great toughness in it.
Henry Ward Beecher
#92. On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
#93. Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.
Charlie Munger
#94. When something horrible happens, it's human nature to want to blame it on someone. We want someone to be held accountable, even though sometimes things just happen.
Meg Cabot
#96. Jesus indicated that there will be a permissive society just before He comes back ... the world today is on an immoral binge such as has not been known since the days of Rome. We are in a hedonistic society, and what we are seeing is human nature expressing itself without God.
Billy Graham
#97. Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.
Mikhail Bakunin
#98. The process has now run full circle: Preaching originates in personal counseling; preaching is personal counseling on a group basis; personal counseling originates in preaching. Personal counseling imparts to the preacher a practical familiarity with human nature which he would not otherwise obtain.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#99. Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature ... This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.
John Dewey
#100. Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?
Bret Easton Ellis
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