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Human Nature Quotes

Browse 4693 quotes about Human Nature.

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Human Nature Quotes

“The area between the nose and the chin, the subject of kissing and the vehicle for speech, is perhaps even more known and set upon than the eyes. The mouth is also riddled with a complex interweaving of folds, curves, flats and lost-and-found edges. These nuances are needed by a perceptive person who might try to understand human nature.”

TryingHumansPersonsMightEyeFoundLostKnownSubjectsHuman NatureNeededKissingSpeechMouthsAreasComplexesEdgesNosesFlatsVehicleCurvesFoldsChinsNuancePortraitureLost And Found
Author:Robert Genn
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“Running a multi-million dollar business can be frustrating at times, especially when someone does something I am not happy with. It might not even be their fault, but it is human nature to reach in an angry or heated way. However, I have learned an important and effective lesson. Rather than complain to my member of staff about their actions, I search my memory bank for things I find wonderful about them. This changes the energy around the issue instantly. People tend to live up to what you expect of them.”

PeopleWayHumansDoeImportantMightRunningActionEnergyMemoriesMillionsIssuesWonderfulHuman NatureLessonsMembersAngryDollarsFaultsComplainingI Have LearnedStaffFrustratingMillion DollarsNot Happy
Author:Vishen Lakhiani
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“Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.”

PeopleIfsWorldHumansRealityMightNumbersTechnologyHuman NatureStrangeInternetDrugAvailableSillyInstanceDemonTrappedPioneersVirtual RealitySmall Numbers
Author:Jaron Lanier
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“It is our genetic nature as a species to believe as young children that our parents and elders are right. We watch them to see what's what. Later on we can judge for ourselves and rebel if need be, but when we're just months old, or a year or two, and a parent looks at us with impatience, or disgust, or disdain, or just leaves us there to cry and doesn't answer us even though we're longing to be embraced and nurtured, we assume that something must be wrong with us. Unfortunately, at that age it's impossible to think there might be something wrong with them.”

IfsThinkingNeedsYearsBelieveLooksChildrenTwoMightAgeYoungParentAnswersWatchesImpossibleHuman NatureSelf EsteemCryJudgingMonthsEmbraceLongingAssumingParentingSpeciesRebelDisgustingEldersImpatienceRaising ChildrenYoung ChildrenDisdainBad Parenting
Author:Jean Liedloff
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“I think that the desire to be cruel and to hurt (with words because any other way might be dangerous to ourself) is part of human nature. Parties are battles (most parties), a conversation is a duel (often). Everybody's trying to hurt first, to get in the dig that will make him or her feel superior, feel triumph.”

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Book:The letters of Jean Rhys
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“We stand in need of such reflections to comfort us for the loss of some illustrious characters, which in our eyes might have seemed the most worthy of the heavenly present. The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human natures.”

NeedsHumansCharacterMightEyeAgeNamesLossHistoryHuman NatureComfortReflectionDignitySlaveWorthyHeavenlyEldersEmperorRoman EmpireGalen
Book:EDWARD GIBBON Premium Collection: Historiographical Works, Memoirs & Letters: Including
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“Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due, might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.”

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Book:Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States
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“No doubt hard work is a great police agent. If everybody were worked from morning till night, and then carefully locked up, the register of crime might be greatly diminished. But what would become of human nature? Where would be the room for growth in such a system of things? It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and need, a variety of passions, circumstances, and temptations, even through sin and misery, that men's natures are developed.”

IfsMenNeedsHumansHardMightWould BeNightPassionGrowthSinRoomsMorningDoubtHuman NatureCrimeHard WorkCircumstancesSorrowPoliceMiseryTemptationAgentsPlentyVarietyNo DoubtLockedRegisterMirthLocked Up
Book:Friends in Council: A Series of Readings and Discourse Thereon
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“I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger.”

MenHumansFeelingsMightSufferingInterestPleasureViewsVirtueHuman NatureDangerHabitCivilizationSolitudeSeasonsPrejudiceWesternSimplicitySnowAcquireNativeImperfectionSavagesNoveltyGrandeur
Book:Evans's Pedestrious Tour
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“Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled - though as we'll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past. Pull them if you want, but they'll just keep coming back again and again.”

IfsWantHumansHas BeensMatterMightPastGrowingHuman NatureRootsRangeDietsReachingWeedAgain And AgainComing BackBack Again
Author:Christopher Ryan
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“Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.”

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Book:The Collected Edition: Brighton rock
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“You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered.”

PeopleIfsMenWantHumansLongMightDesireEnergySidesTermSinHuman NaturePolicyAssumingArguingLong TermGlobal WarmingInsecurityPollutionUrbanEmpoweredTransportationBad ManEnergy PolicyUrban Sprawl
Author:Joel Achenbach
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“I'm such a product of my media diet... it's interesting that you say what I do is observational. It's observational as far as it goes - to the extent that I observe media closely. Kriota might have a better sense of this. I don't always have the best sense of how human nature works, but I certainly know how to dismantle representations of characters.”

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Author:Robert Sikoryak
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“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.”

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Author:Doris Kearns Goodwin
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“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.”

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Author:Steven Pinker
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“Would there not be the greatest reason to apprehend, that error in the first sentence would be the parent of error in the second sentence? That the strong bias of one decision would be apt to overrule the influence of any new lights, which might be brought to vary the complexion of another decision? Those, who know any thing of human nature, will not hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative.”

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Book:The Origin of the Nation: Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights and Other Amendments, Federalist Papers & Common Sense: Creating America - Landmark Documents that Shaped a New Nation
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“Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.”

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Book:Bluebeard's Egg
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“If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'”

IfsKnowsMenGivingHumansMayLongDoeMightUsedFatherHeavenBornHuman NaturePoetPeriodsFitConstitutionHorseSticksSubstanceOne ManSomething BetterSelectedIdiom
Author:Charles Ives
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“Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake.”

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Book:Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
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“I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...”

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Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

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Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“'Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father, and to My God, and your God' (Jn. 20:!7). He is our Father by grace through the Spirit of adoption (Rom. 8:15), but His Father by nature on account of His divinity. Similarly, He is our God as the creator of our human nature, but His God by reason of the dispensation whereby He became man. He made these distinctions so that we might understand the difference.”

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Author:Gregory Palamas
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“Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty, and a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body. A person might even be described as a self-contained multiverse.”

NeedsHumansMayPersonsSelfBodyMightHumanityPassionIndividualHuman BeingsBeautyPsychologyHuman NatureCreaturesHungerIndividualitySelf RealizationRealizationConsiderationPoeticOverwhelmingFlavorExitPhysical BodyMultiverseSelf Contained
Author:Aberjhani
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