Human Nature Quotes - Page 3

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.

While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.

A sin is nothing more than regret. Not for doing it once, but doing it again when you know you’re going to regret it.

Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgement, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility.

Believe in human beings - not all are good, but deep down all can be. But that doesn't mean you need to hang around crappy people and try to turn them around.

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.

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.

Blessed are the doubters: for they shall not be easily fooled.

Academic pedigree alone is no guarantor of useful knowledge and wisdom.

Recognizing power in another does not diminish your own.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.

It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.

Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions.