Quotes by Subject: Human Nature
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People do not lack strength; they lack will. | |||
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. | * | ||
Few men have the natural strength to honour a friend's success without envy. | |||
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. | |||
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. | |||
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today. | |||
Only fools are positive. | |||
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. | |||
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be. | |||
To err is human, but it feels divine. | |||
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. | |||
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple. | |||
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. | |||
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. | |||
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. | * | ||
I can resist anything but temptation. | |||
Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. | |||
Moral indignation is, in most cases, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy. | |||
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. | * | ||
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. | |||
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. | |||
Champions take responsibility. When the ball is coming over the net, you can be sure I want the ball. | |||
A business must fulfill the needs of the human spirit. These include survival, safety, play, celebration, love, belongingness, self-esteem and self-actualization. | * | ||
There is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly. | |||
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle. | |||
Courage is the capacity to conduct oneself with restraint in times of prosperity and with courage and tenacity when things do not go well. | |||
Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead. | |||
The more opinions you have, the less you see. | * | ||
Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence. | * | ||
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. | * | ||
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. | |||
Although your company is highly profitable, I wouldn't be much of a consultant if I didn't recommend changes. | |||
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. (The Third Man, 1949) | |||
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. | |||
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. | |||
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. | |||
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must either be a beast or a god. | |||
When the eagles are silent, the parrots being to jabber. | * | ||
I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old. | |||
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. | |||
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. | |||
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. | |||
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. | * | ||
He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander. | |||
You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty. | |||
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting. | |||
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living. | |||
Hell is paved with good intentions, not bad ones. All men mean well. | |||
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. | |||
There is no love sincerer than the love of food. | |||
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. | |||
Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch. | |||
When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of putting it into practice. | * | ||
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. | |||
We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. | * | ||
The average person thinks he isn?t. | |||
If there is a wrong way to do something, then someone will do it. | |||
Murphy?s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. | |||
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. | |||
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. | |||
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. | * | ||
Grub first, then ethics. | |||
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. | |||
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time. | |||
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. | * | ||
No good deed goes unpunished. | |||
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon. | |||
Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. | |||
I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa, seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror... As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight. | * | ||
The wretched have no compassion. | * | ||
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children. | |||
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. | |||
Virtue had never been as respectable as money. | |||
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. | |||
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. | * | ||
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. | * | ||
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. | |||
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. | |||
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. | |||
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. | |||
Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens. | |||
Those who stand for nothing fall for anything. | * | ||
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man. | |||
Men have become the tools of their tools. | |||
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. | * | ||
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. | * | ||
There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject. | |||
More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else... All our lauded technological progress--our very civilization--is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal. | |||
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. | * | ||
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. | * | ||
The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world. | |||
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. | |||
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. | |||
Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice. | |||
The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. | |||
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. | * | ||
Go into the street and give one man a lecture on morality and another a shilling, and see which will repect you most. | |||
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. | |||
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas. | * | ||
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. | |||
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. | |||
Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. | |||
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors. | |||
Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes. | |||
There is no evil that does not offer inducements. Avarice promises money; luxury, a varied assortment of pleasure; ambition, a purple robe and applause. Vices tempt you by the rewards which they offer. | |||
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. | |||
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. | |||
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years. | |||
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins. | |||
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues. | |||
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities. | |||
When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it. | |||
During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe... where every man is enemy to every man. In such conditions there is no place for Industry... no Arts; no Letters; no Society... and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. | |||
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence. | |||
Its never just a game when you're winning. | |||
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. | * | ||
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. | |||
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? | |||
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. | |||
An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out. | |||
People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true. | |||
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure? | |||
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination. | * | ||
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot. | |||
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying. | |||
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. | |||
Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another. | |||
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. | |||
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become. | |||
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. | * | ||
People only see what they are prepared to see. | * | ||
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actual fools. | |||
When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our days and nights into a hellish turmoil. | |||
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. | * | ||
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. | |||
None are so busy as the fool and knave. | |||
When the laws are written and administered by the most powerful leaders in a society, it is human nature for them to understand, justify, and protect the interests of themselves and people like them. Many injustices arise from this natural human failing. | |||
The good cannot seize power, nor retain it; to do this men must love power. And the love of power is inconsistent with goodness; but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities: pride, cunning, cruelty. | * | ||
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. | |||
Stupid people are generally conservative. | * | ||
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. | |||
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues. | |||
It is hard to elieve that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. | |||
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. | |||
The people I am most afraid of are those who are the most afraid. | * | ||
Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong. | * | ||
You never know you are in prison unless you try the door. | |||
Last words are for fools who haven't said enough. | * | ||
Falling feels like flying, for a little while. | * | ||
Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to. | |||
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. | * | ||
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. | * | ||
*indicates a past Quote of The Week
