Best human-nature & book Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

Source: Rules of Civility: A Novel

“Comics play a trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought.”

“It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.”

“A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.”

Men Humans Two Book Human Nature Letters Clash Authorship

Book:Literature and Life

Source: Literature and Life

“He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.”

Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)

“My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.”

Way Humans Book Shows Found Conditions Human Nature Despair Perfection Absolutes Inevitable Pessimism Human Condition Attempting Handicaps

Author:Stanislaw Lem

“I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.”

People Knows Writing Years Humans I Can Book Stories Strong One Thing Human Nature Changed Reader News Magazines Vivid Blogs Delivery Soothing Credible Venues

Author:Anna Quindlen

“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”

Writing Book Would Be Humanity Literature Human Nature Concepts

Author:Hermann Hesse

“There is something about human nature that just doesn't want to face the reality that we live in two worlds. We live in the physical, material world where we have jobs, read books, and go about our business. And we live in a spiritual world - and that is a world at war.”

World Want Humans Two Book War Reality Jobs Faces Spiritual Human Nature Materials Material World Two Worlds

Author:John Eldredge

“For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.”

“The idea wasn't to make a direct political statement since the current economic collapse hadn't begun when we started on the book. The parallels I'm most interested in are the ways that human nature never changes, no matter how far back in time you look.”

Way Humans Looks Book Ideas Matter Political Economic Human Nature Direct Currents Statements Collapse Parallels Never Change Back In Time Economic Collapse

Author:James Vance

“Peter Kropotkin was surely on the left. He was one of the founders of what is now called 'sociobiology' or 'evolutionary psychology' with his book Mutual Aid, arguing that human nature had evolved in ways conducive to the communitarian anarchism that he espoused.”

Way Humans Book Left Psychology Human Nature Aids Arguing Mutual Peter Founders Evolutionary Psychology Anarchism Mutual Aid

Author:Noam Chomsky

“I think if I were reading to a grandchild, I might read Tolstoy's War and Peace. They would learn about Russia, they would learn about history, they would learn about human nature. They would learn about, "Can the individual make a difference or is it great forces?" Tolstoy is always battling with those large issues. Mostly, a whole world would come alive for them through that book.”

Ifs Thinking World Humans Book War Whole Might Reading Individual Force Differences Issues Alive Human Nature Russia Whole World Making A Difference Grandchildren

Author:Doris Kearns Goodwin

“The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.”

Humans Book Political Human Nature Example Draws Enlightenment Connections Constitution Debate Political Systems New Books Framing American Constitution

Author:Steven Pinker

“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.”

World Humans Heart Book Happens Education Human Nature Possibility Creator Good Book

Author:Susan Sontag

“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”

“Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.’ – Book 3, Chapter 16”

Men Humans Book Realizing Human Nature Hypocrisy Live By Sincerity Chapters Schooled

Author:Rafael Sabatini

“A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.”

Feels Humans Book Hands Taken Human Nature Reader Civilization Essentials Sacred Meetings Shelves Bookstores Unimaginable Retail Shrines Artifacts

Author:Jason Epstein

“You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.”

Humans Book Reading Human Nature New York Reading Books Reading The Bible

Book:Human Nature in the Bible

Source: Human Nature in the Bible

“The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.”

People Way Humans Book Might Religion Heaven Religious Lines Hell Human Nature Morality Holy Threat Rewards Cynic Barbaric Holy Books

Author:Richard Dawkins

Human Nature Quotes

Related topics

Human Nature Quotes