Human Nature Quotes - Page 13

Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. ‘What is the egg to the eagle?’ he asked me…

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing “Come All Ye Faithful” like mad. Big deal. It’s supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can’t see anything religious or pretty, for God’s sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would’ve puked if he could see it.

I don't know why people are afraid of lust. Then I can imagine that they are very afraid of me, for I have a great lust for everything. A lust for life, a lust for how the summer-heated street feels beneath my feet, a lust for the touch of another's skin on my skin...a lust for everything. I even lust after cake. Yes, I am very lusty and very scary.

Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.

People are crazy and times are strangeI'm locked in tight, I'm out of rangeI used to care, but things have changed

On various occasions, especially in trying to think of western American history in the context of the worldwide history of colonialism, it has struck me that much of the mental behavior that we sometimes denounce as ethnocentrism and cultural insensitivity actually derives less from our indifference or hostility than from our clumsiness and awkwardness when we leave the comfort of the English language behind... [V]enturing outside the bounds of the English language exercises and stretches our minds in ways that are essential for getting as close as we can to the act of seeing the world from what would otherwise remain unfamiliar and alien perspectives.

Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

As long as humans feel they are forced to defend their own rights and worth by placing someone beneath them, oppression will not end.

While ritual, emotion and reasoning are all significant aspects of human nature, the most nearly unique human characteristic is the ability to associate abstractly and to reason. Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species; and the most characteristically human activities are mathematics, science, technology, music and the arts--a somewhat broader range of subjects than is usually included under the "humanities." Indeed, in its common usage this very word seems to reflect a peculiar narrowness of vision about what is human. Mathematics is as much a "humanity" as poetry.

The purpose of the gospel is to make bad men good and good men better, and to change human nature.

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.

We will ensure a place for you in heaven, but we will make this place a hell." Religious exploiters"Follow us for a greater economy and other superficial dreams, and we will make sure it never happens, ever." Political Class"I search for happiness in all the wrong places because I have been conditioned to believe that happiness is somewhere outside (can't find it within)." Common Man"You are absolutely free to do anything only if you do what we say." Society

People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.

One of the greatest gift you can give another human being whi is going through adversity is HOPE.

Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well those that they already have.

Humans are caught -- in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too -- in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any chances we may impose of field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I don well -- or ill?

I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

The only bearable thing about being human is that you can change, the second you feel like. Get it through your head that you changes, and cut yourself some slack before you fucking choke to death from all the apologies in your throat.

An anti-hero is just a villain you spend a lot of time with.

Do not be dismayed to learn there is a bit of the devil in you. There is a bit of the devil in us all.

The Self is the measure of everything.

Man will destroy what man fears!

We tell the dead to rest in peace, when we should worry about the living to live in peace.

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.

Nature has gone to great lengths to hide our subconscious from ourselves. Why?

Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That’s life. That’s human nature.

Humor relieves the tension between what we see or desire but repress in order to sustain a survivable illusion about the world we live in. As such it's always potent stuff, and dangerous.

I have discovered that the world over, unusual weather prevails at all times of the year.

Men are by nature wanderers...Every people has moved from somewhere, and had to learn the ways of the land from the people who were there before.

All life-forms are innocent, but man is the greatest innocent life-form that the universe has ever produced. Man is never created bad, as some primitive “revelations” claim. Man is both all-capable, and innocent; Man cannot have better attributes than the ones he already has. Once we defeat scarcity, the factor that has forced all our negative attributes into existence will be no more. Man’s nature is forged by scarcity. Man is a child of scarcity. Some men may currently live in abundance, even obscene abundance, but they still are the children of scarcity. We all are.

Let everyone evolve fast and understand humanity. Let the heart of stones be converted into heart of love.

For all their simplicity, humans could be remarkably perceptive, though they didn't know it most of the time, and their ability to thrust straight through deception and see to the heart of truth was often lost with childhood. By adulthood humans had trained themselves to be coy and manipulative in response to the coy and manipulative society in which they lived, which led them to believe that everyone was trying to be as coy and manipulative as themselves and were uncertain about what was true and what was not. Beyond their few flashes of clarity, everything became a muddle of colliding doubts.

So you've given away the old good and evil? asked Rose, amazed at all this rare talk from Quick.No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts.

oh, the heartbreakingly beautiful tender weight of being human.

Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.

Isn't it strange how people are selective about the truth the want to see or hear?

I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.

Happiness thinks only of itself.

Having problems doesn't make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control.

When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.

Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess

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.

I believe, that creating is a joyful activity as well as a meaningful suffer, and thus, it is an integral part of the human nature.

Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just

Distance reflects the true intensity of the relationship.. Some people come too close & Some forgets that u exist too..

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.

Your blessings are very important to melt down the stony hearts.

From Hinduism to the monotheisms through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge.

God is nature’s anti-dote to misery.

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.

When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart.

In taking our human nature upon Himself, [Jesus] showed us what we might become, what God intended us to be.

He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.

That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature.