Top 100 The Nature Of Man Quotes
#1. It is not the nature of man, as I see it, ever to be quite satisfied with what he has in life ... Contentment tends to breed laxity, but a healthy discontent keeps us alert to the changing needs of our time.
Frances Perkins
#2. Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.
Robert Bellarmine
#3. You must understand that it is not in the nature of Man to be grateful. So in whatever you or I do for others we must never expect gratitude. If we do, we will only be disappointed.
S R Nathan
#4. Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
George R R Martin
#5. It were no slight attainment could we merely fulfil what the nature of man implies.
Epictetus
#6. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#7. I wonder if those who live here get used to this beauty."
"Undoubtedly, Magnificence. It is the nature of man to become oblivious to that which is around him daily,
Raymond E. Feist
#8. The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.
James Madison
#9. There is a saying in China that the nature of man is found there, in the center, where emotions are not yet manifest. In this center is the potentiality of everything to come.
Richard Wilhelm
#10. In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
Richard M. Nixon
#11. Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature.
Roger Ebert
#12. It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. The trickiest thing is the nature of man, apparent in everything.
Aristophanes
#14. For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him.
Thucydides
#15. We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.
Frederic Bastiat
#16. Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.
Leo Strauss
#17. Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game.
Ted Williams
#18. The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.
Francis Bacon
#19. Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life ... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.
Margaret Thatcher
#20. A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.
Tacitus
#21. The sum of the whole is plainly this: The nature of man considered in his single capacity, and with respect only to the present world, is adapted and leads him to attain the greatest happiness he can for himself in the present world.
Joseph Butler
#22. For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.
Thomas Hobbes
#23. I have no doubt about it. I think this is a part of the nature of man, a desire for freedom, for dignified life.
Judy Woodruff
#24. Cursed is everyone who places his hope in changing the nature of man
Saint Augustine
#25. The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals
Swami Vivekananda
#26. It is an oftentimes dangerous world, and not all of the people in it are nice, sweet and benevolent. It is the nature of man to behave otherwise, and we must find leaders who can show us a better way and still maintains a balanced view.
Mike Medavoy
#27. God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.
Francis Schaeffer
#28. The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
#29. And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.
Chaim Potok
#30. The nature of man is evil; what is good in him is artificial.
Xunzi
#31. I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectable community of men - while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror?
Thomas Mann
#32. Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.
Murray Rothbard
#33. Have you considered that maybe this is the birth of a new world, that what happens next is a golden opportunity to change the nature of man in a fundamental way?"
"Those are brave words, Tiresias."
"New parents can't afford to be anything but brave, Eddie.
Joe McKinney
#34. It is simply that in all life on earth as in all good agriculture there are no short-cuts that by-pass Nature and the nature of man himself and animals, trees, rocks and streams. Every attempt at a formula, a short-cut, a panacea, always ends in negation and destruction.
Louis Bromfield
#35. His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.
Victor Hugo
#36. It is not in the nature of man to bear the cross, to love the cross, to keep under the body and to bring it into subjection, to fly from honours, to bear reproaches meekly, to despise self and desire to be despised, to bear all adversities and losses, and to desire no prosperity in this world.
Thomas A Kempis
#37. A passion for the dramatic art is inherent in the nature of man.
Edwin Forrest
#38. The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.
Otto Weininger
#39. It is a part of the nature of man to resist compulsion.
Tacitus
#40. Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,
Max Picard
#41. Souls do not wish to be bullied, but gently brought back; such is the nature of man.
Saint Francis De Sales
#42. The nature of man is such that people consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they confer as by those they receive.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#43. A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
James Russell Lowell
#44. It's the nature of man to ask questions.
Belgarath
David Eddings
#45. They, therefore, who are hasty in their devotions and think a little will do, are strangers both to the nature of devotion and the nature of man; they do not know that they are to learn to pray, and that prayer is to be learnt as they learn other things, by frequency, constancy, and perseverance.
William Law
#46. The urge to dominion is God-given and is basic to the nature of man. An aspect of this dominion is property.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#47. Nothing cruel is in fact beneficial; for cruelty is extremely hostile to the nature of man, which we ought to follow.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#48. History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.
George R R Martin
#49. In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time.
Thomas Jefferson
#51. It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.
John Steinbeck
#52. There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#53. It is the nature of the brute to remain where he is (not to progress); it is the nature of man to seek good and avoid evil; it is the nature of God to seek neither, but just to be eternally blissful. Let us be God!
Swami Vivekananda
#54. It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.
Michael James Jackson
#55. Man is everywhere dangerously unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble.
Sir Laurens Van Der Post
#56. The cause of all trouble, the root of all sorrow, the dread of every man lies in this one small word - sin. It has crippled the nature of man ... It has caused man to be caught in the devil's trap.
Billy Graham
#57. If there is one thing that is really cheerful in the world, it is cheerfulness. I have noticed it often. And I have noticed that when a man is right down cheerful, he is seldom unhappy for the time being. Such is the nature of man.
Mark Twain
#58. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.
Stanley Kubrick
#59. In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.
Stephen R. Covey
#60. But the ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.
William Ellery Channing
#61. In the cause of expedience and the quest for information, man has always been willing to trump his laws and betray his beliefs to legitimize the torture of those who do not share them.
Mark Allen Smith
#62. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in
the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste.
Howard Thurman
#63. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man.
William Beebe
#64. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.
George Mason
#65. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia
#66. The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
Jacob Bronowski
#68. Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.
Jules Michelet
#69. It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.
Leo Tolstoy
#70. It is nature that is changing, not the soul of man. This never changes.
Swami Vivekananda
#71. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.
Bertrand Russell
#72. Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it's a holy act.
Mario Botta
#73. And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness, Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.
Joseph Glanvill
#74. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.
Rose A. Zimbardo
#75. Every man by nature is a freeman born; by nature no man cometh out of the womb under any civil subjection to king, prince, or judge.
Samuel Rutherford
#76. There are at bottom but two possible religions
that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.
James Anthony Froude
#77. The proper drinking of Scotch whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man's determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.
David Daiches
#78. Man is precisely what the Bible says he is. Human nature is behaving exactly as the Bible said it would. The course of human events is flowing just as Christ predicted.
Billy Graham
#79. Deep within the human constitution lie written laws of nature that should guide man in the conduct of his life.
Herbert M. Shelton
#80. A Spendthrift.-He has not yet the poverty of the rich man who has counted all his treasure,-he squanders his spirit with the irrationalness of the spendthrift Nature.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
John Dewey
#82. Man can have strength of character only as he is capable of controlling his faculties; of choosing a rational end; and, in its pursuit, of holding fast to his integrity against al! the might of external nature.
Mark Hopkins
#83. It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.
Aristotle.
#84. Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#85. Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind.
Michel De Montaigne
#86. The nature of a coward is to avoid death. If such a man courts peril there can be only two reasons. Either he is not a coward at all or there is no danger.
David Gemmell
#87. No man can sincerely resolve to apply to his daily life the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth without sensing a change in his own nature. The phrase, 'born again', has a deeper significance than many people attach to it. This changed feeling may be indescribable, but it is real.
David O. McKay
#89. War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.
C.E.M. Joad
#90. To be man's tender mate was woman born, and in obeying nature she best serves the purposes of heaven.
Friedrich Schiller
#92. When primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.
Emma Goldman
#93. You can tell the nature of the man by the words he chooses.
Edwin Louis Cole
#94. If a man's thoughts are muddy, If he is reckless and full of deceit, How can he wear the yellow robe? Whoever is master of his own nature, Bright, clear and true, He may indeed wear the yellow robe.
Gautama Buddha
#95. Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.
Aleister Crowley
#96. The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery was a subconscious feeling for the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man.
Bruno Rossi
#97. I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.
Robert Boyle
#98. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.
Henry Beston
#100. A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
Bertrand Russell
