Human Nature Quotes
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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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You can’t study human nature in books. Books is a hindrance more than anything else
George W. Plunkitt
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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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The defects of human nature afford us opportunities of exercising our philosophy, the best employment of our virtues. If all men were righteous, all hearts true and frank and loyal, what use would our virtues be?
Moliere
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I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three months' stay in England and Europe that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection you would have ten-fold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you.
Mahatma Gandhi
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It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power.
John Stuart Mill
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In a large congregation, while there is a wide diversification of interest, it is also true that there are only a few basic human problems. It must also be taken into consideration that people are people regardless of who they are or what their backgrounds may be. There are certain deep universal appeals to human interest and to these human nature always responds.
Norman Vincent Peale
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Human nature is like a drunk peasant. Lift him into the saddle on one side, over he topples on the other side.
Martin Luther
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[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary.
John Locke
Nazareth
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There exists a powerful energizing force in the spiritual life principle. All energy began with the Creator, who infused it not only in all natural processes, but also into that higher form of nature called human nature. The more closely, then, that a person identifies with the Creator, the more surely that person will experience within his or her own nature the process of re-creation which operates in all creation.
Norman Vincent Peale
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The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear from thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
John Stuart Mill
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Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.
Abraham Lincoln
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Unfortunately, the world has taken some of the greatest minds God has given us and locked them up in cages. Most very brilliant or creative people seem strange to ordinary people. Geniuses are almost always outcasts. The intelligent are bullied on the playground. They see the world differently and are shunned for it. They nearly all turn out to be lonely at the least, locked up at the worst. It's human nature to encourage the status quo and shun those who see life differently.
Ted Dekker
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The best movies are made from a point of view of an understanding of human nature and an understanding of history and an understanding of what motivates people, of what makes a good movie from an emotional place.
Harrison Ford
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For you do by nature want to do what you take to be good for you; reason reveals that what is in fact good for you is acting in a way that is conducive to the fulfillment of the ends or purposes inherent in human nature; and so if you are rational, and thus open to seeing what is in fact good for you, you will take the fulfillment of those ends or purposes to be good for you and act accordingly. This may require a fight against one’s desires and such a fight might in some cases be so extremely difficult and unpleasant that one might not have the stomach for it. But that is a problem of will, not of reason. It doesn’t show that the rational thing is not to struggle against one’s desires, but only that doing the rational thing can sometimes be extremely difficult and unpleasant.
Edward Feser
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There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.
Charles Dickens
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No one should dogmatize about the capacity of human nature for degradation or exaltation.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?
Victor Hugo
