Human Nature Quotes
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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.
Philip James Bailey
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I refuse to believe that the tendency of human nature is always downward.
Mahatma Gandhi
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My mother understood human nature better and never chided. She knew that a man cannot be saved from his own foolishness or vice by someone else's efforts or protests, but only by the use of his own will.
Nikola Tesla
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How great, therefore, the wickedness of human nature is! How many girls there are who prevent conception and kill and expel tender fetuses, although procreation is the work of God.
Martin Luther
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After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn't very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Of all the doctrines of the Bible none is so offensive to human nature as the doctrine of God's sovereignty.
J. C. Ryle
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The mind is acquired "human nature". The conscience is inherent "spiritual nature".
Ian Gardner
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I reckon there's as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more.
Edward Noyes Westcott
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They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. ... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit.
Galileo Galilei
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Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
Sigmund Freud
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The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Francis Bacon
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Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
Edward T. Hall
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I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Human nature being what it is, peace must inevitably be a relative condition. The essence of life is struggle and competition, and to that extent perfect peace is an almost meaningless abstraction. Struggle and competition are stimulating, but when they degenerate into conflict it is usually both destructive and disruptive. The aim of political institutions like the United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for nations to stay on the right side of that line.
Javier Perez de Cuellar
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For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates ... in the soul, and overflows from thence, as from the head into the eyes.
Plato
