Top 100 What Is Human Nature Quotes
#1. What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#2. So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work - what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?
Ray Dalio
#3. Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,
the human soul!
James Russell Lowell
#4. When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#5. Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
Henry Adams
#6. And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.
Adam Weishaupt
#7. Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Albert Camus
#8. What am I then, my God? What is my nature? A life varied, multifaceted and truly immense.
Saint Augustine
#9. The age of leaders has come and gone. You must be your own leader now. You must contain the spirit of our time in your own life and your own nature. You must really explore, as you've never explored before, what human nature is like.
Laurens Van Der Post
#10. I own that there is a haughtiness and fierceness in human nature which will cause innumerable broils, place men in what situation you please.
Edmund Burke
#11. Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don't. Everybody worships; it's just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.
Paul David Tripp
#12. You feel, as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature. - Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.
Jane Austen
#13. 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
#14. That's what life is all about: remembering someone and smiling!
Minnie Pearl
#15. What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.
Jean Baudrillard
#17. What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such - of what lies beyond the human and the made - and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.
Susan Sontag
#18. I think it is the hardest thing in the world. I'm endlessly intrigued by what human nature is capable of, both the horrible things we are capable of and also the heroic things. I'm really interested in exploring that side of human nature.
Veena Sud
#19. 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
#20. they say people only hear what they want to hear,
but i don't know if that is always true, i've been wanting to hear your heart and it's as silent as the moon.
AVA.
#21. Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.
Paul Samuelson
#22. I guess it's human nature to question yourself, to question why all the pain has had to happen? sometimes there isn't any answers it just is what it is and how we make ourselves feel and see through that, is what will determine how we move forward.
Nikki Rowe
#23. What we see in this world is a gross abnormality. The human consciousness fails to perceive the very simple, divine nature of every atom in every moment.
Frederick Lenz
#24. Artifacts are alive. Each has a voice. They remind us what it means to be human - that it is our nature to survive, to create works of beauty to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in.
Terry Tempest Williams
#25. If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.
Mencius
#26. I felt the heat of the animosity they bear towards me, the vindictive nature that drives a man to destroy his neighbour in a fire as if he were a banned book ... for what is the difference? Every book is imbued with the human spirit.
Sjon
#27. Ability for stupendous toil is lodged in every human spirit, a grand gift from the God of nature; but only the persevering worker knows what this latent power is able to achieve.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#28. If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
Thomas Sowell
#29. 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
#30. O admirable necessity! O powerful action! What mind can penetrate your nature? What language can express this marvel? None, to be sure. This is where human discourse turns toward the contemplation of the divine.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#31. I realized that if what we call human nature can be changed, then absolutely anything is possible. From that moment my life changed.
Shirley Maclaine
#32. There - fore what is contrary to human nature is contrary to God's will.
Peter Kreeft
#33. What I love most about nature is how indifferent it is to us humans and human suffering. While we are here with our little or big tragedies - the wind is blowing, the leaves are rustling in the trees, the flowers bloom, and die - there's a great comfort in that indifference,
Valzhyna Mort
#34. The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?
David McCullough
#35. But what else could we do but hope? that, after all, is human nature.
Thomas Buergenthal
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. What is important is that Marx's theory of history is a vision of human beings in a state of alienation. Human beings cannot be free if they are subject to forces that determine their thoughts, their ideas, their very nature as human beings.
Anonymous
#39. Biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the Other? The question is how, in her, nature has been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity has made of the human female.
Simone De Beauvoir
#40. What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all palisades, all fences, within which she is held captive!
Alexander Herzen
#42. I think believing in something is what matters most.
Believe in nature or believe in love or believe that by
doing the right thing you can make some difference
to another human being or an entire generation.
Rachel C. Weingarten
#45. It is part of our human nature to question what we know and what we don't know.
Brian Michael Good
#46. What I found interesting is that it's human nature to have a family.
Penelope Spheeris
#47. Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.
Arundhati Roy
#48. What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.
Hermann Hesse
#49. I do not think a philosopher who would apply himself so earnestly to the explaining the ultimate principles of the soul, would show himself a great master in the very science of human nature, which he pretends to explain, or very knowing in what is naturally satisfactory to the mind of man.
David Hume
#50. We have to combine, certainly, but if we combine to fight on the idea of each man making more money for himself, then we end by fighting one another. And that's the trouble now ... human dealings are founded - founded - not on money but on what is fair and just all round.
Neil M. Gunn
#51. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.
Ted Chiang
#52. Human nature has been sold short ... [humans have] a higher nature which ... includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well.
Abraham Maslow
#53. It is not human nature to enjoy what we get with no effort.
Sri Chinmoy
#55. What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,
and that is not only true, but identical,
that men always act from self-interest.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#56. What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
Terence McKenna
#57. Human nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above. K. Hepburn in The African Queen
Jan Karon
#58. Those works alone can have enduring success which successfully appeal to what is permanent in human nature
which, while suiting the taste of the day, contain truths and beauty deeper than the opinions and tastes of the day.
George Henry Lewes
#59. There is a law in human nature which draws us to like what we passionately condemn.
George William Russell
#60. What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
Irene Nemirovsky
#61. What's so wonderful about 'The Walking Dead' is that we're able to explore human nature in its most depraved as well as its most humanitarian in each episode.
Gale Anne Hurd
#62. It is human nature to avoid what makes us uncomfortable.
Jodi Meadows
#63. Human nature being what it is, people will insist upon getting some pleasure out of life.
Bertrand Russell
#64. If there's any greater exhibit of the malleability of human nature than the sight of someone standing, absently waiting for the light to change at a deserted intersection, I don't know what it is.
Christopher Sorrentino
#65. A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
Susan Sontag
#66. It has made me what I am. When every door is closed, one learns to climb through windows. Human nature, I suppose.
Frances Hardinge
#67. Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.
Pindar
#68. We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.
Carl Sagan
#69. The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.
Lillian B. Rubin
#70. It.
Such is the perversity of human nature that what we have in abundance-our work, our possessions, and the beauty of our surroundings-we take for granted and learn to ignore, so that we are often paralyzed by boredom, indifference, and ingratitude.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#71. What we usually call human evolution is the awakening of the divine nature within us.
Peace Pilgrim
#72. The human spirit is so utterly one with the body that the term "form" can be used of the body and retain its proper meaning. Conversely, the form of the body is spirit, and this is what makes the human being a person.
Pope Benedict XVI
#73. 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
#74. Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#75. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflection on human nature?
James Madison
#76. People are not hooked on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook but on each other. Tools and services come and go; what is constant is our human urge to share.
Alfred Hermida
#77. What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with it to man. It s like a mould cast of the world and man and human nature, everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what mysteries are solved and revealed
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#78. I think we simply all like to project ourselves into somebody else - somebody who is better-looking, richer, smarter. It's comforting. It's escapism, and that, of course, is what the movies are supposed to be all about. Ultimately, I think it's just part of human nature to pretend.
Richard D. Zanuck
#79. Every time the sky cries, it is because an angel has died ... Lucifer started a war in Heaven, and it persists even now. So if God cannot keep his angels under control, what makes you believe that he can keep humanity under control?
Lionel Suggs
#80. Consequently there is a need for spiritual vitality. What protection is there against the danger of organisation? Man is once more faced with the problem of himself. He can cope with every danger except the danger of human nature itself. In the last resort it all turns upon man.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#81. What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?
Umberto Eco
#82. It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
William Bernbach
#83. To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light.
C. G. Jung
#84. And do you see how beautiful and graceful the birds are when they are flying and soaring? The ground has many comforts for them to enjoy... But in the sky they are truly what a bird is meant to be. So it is with the human heart.
Aleksandra Layland
#85. A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind.
Marcus Aurelius
#86. You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? ... The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you.
William Hoffman
#87. What is the nature of human beings? When someone does something wrong to them, they will go after him [to punish, to fight].
Dada Bhagwan
#88. We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
Jacob Bronowski
#89. Squabbling over too little is just human nature. But it says a great deal about a person, what they do with abundance.
Tessa Dare
#90. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#91. What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery?
Mary Shelley
#92. I have believed for a long time that human nature is a reciprocity of what is inside the skin and what is outside: that it is definitely not "rolled up inside us" but our way of being one with our fellows and our world. I call this field theory.
Gardner Murphy
#93. Doubt is human nature. It's what we do with it that matters.
Justin Cronin
#94. You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
Hilary Mantel
#95. No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Virginia Woolf
#96. Human nature is what Heaven supplies.
Xun Zi
#97. I think if there was no violence in our world, there would be no violence in film. Violence is a part of human nature, and obviously it's a troublesome part of human nature. You always have responsibilities when you portray violence in what angle you put down on that scene.
Niels Arden Oplev
#98. What is perfect, anyway? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don't want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.
Allie Burke
#100. We have to realize what we are. The range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.
Steve Hagen
