In the intricate tapestry of existence, human nature stands as one of its most enigmatic threads. Throughout history, philosophers, writers, and thinkers have sought to unravel its mysteries, offering insights that resonate deeply with our own experiences. This collection of 109 quotes on human nature is a journey through the wisdom of the ages, capturing the essence of our shared humanity. Whether exploring our capacity for love and empathy or pondering the complexities of our motivations and desires, these quotes invite reflection, sparking conversations about who we are and what it means to be human. Join us as we delve into these timeless observations that shine a light on the profound and often paradoxical nature of being.
1. “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” - Albert Camus
2. “They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.” - Ernest Hemingway
3. “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” - G.K. Chesterton
4. “Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.” - Peter Morgan
5. “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” - Sigmund Freud
6. “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.” - Camille Paglia
7. “If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.” - Henry Ward Beecher
8. “It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.” - Virginia Woolf
9. “People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.” - Chuck Palahniuk
10. “When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
11. “The girl in your class who suggests that this year the Drama Club put on The Bald Soprano will be a thorn in people's sides all of her life.” - Fran Lebowitz
12. “On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” - George Orwell
13. “...One thing you learn when you've lived as long as I have-people aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.” - Neal Shusterman
14. “We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.” - C.S. Lewis
15. “The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.” - Alan Lightman
16. “The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.” - Alan Lightman
17. “…brotherhood of the firstborn, which can be both a blessing and a curse: the overwhelming attention to the detail of their lives and development. The expectations that run too high: being the bridge between adults and children, one foot in either place and the accompanying hollow lonely feeling of being nowhere.” - Whitney Otto
18. “The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.” - Samuel Johnson
19. “Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.” - Claude Levi-Strauss
20. “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.” - Patricia Nelson Limerick
21. “The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.” - Aberjhani
22. “All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.” - Alphonse Karr
23. “I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.” - Steve Martin
24. “The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.” - Dawn Powell
25. “Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history.” - Ayn Rand
26. “Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
27. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott
28. “Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his gold. He knows his freedom, and also what it is worth its weight in. The equation balances when he is offered something credible. The result is ONE.There can be no doubt that gods have appeared, not only in ancient times but even late in history; they feasted with us and fought at our sides. But what good is the splendor of bygone banquets to a starving man? What good is the clinking of gold that a poor man hears through the wall of time? The gods must be called.The anarch lets all this be; he can bide his time. He has his ethos, but not morals. He recognizes lawfulness, but not the law; he despises rules. Whenever ethos goes into shalts and shalt-nots, it is already corrupted. Still, it can harmonize with them, depending on location and circumstances, briefly or at length, just as I harmonize here with the tyrant for as long as I like.One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians ("God is goodness") castrate the Good Lord.” - Ernst Jünger
29. “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. ” - John Stuart Mill
30. “But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.” - Emma Goldman
31. “The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” - C.S. Lewis
32. “What manner of people they were only books and other people could tell... and the tale was a long and gory one dating from the dim, conjectural dawn of history. But being human they were as apt to change as mother nature to remain constant.” - Robert Edison Fulton Jr.
33. “..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.” - Dean Koontz
34. “He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.” - Oscar Wilde
35. “We the people have no excuse for starry-eyed sycophantic group-think in the Information Age. Knowledge is but a fingertip away.” - Tiffany Madison
36. “It is assured that men of all ages imagine a woman naked when they first meet.” - Tiffany Madison
37. “We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.” - Michael Crichton
38. “The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual.” - Robert A. Heinlein
39. “There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.” - C. JoyBell C.
40. “Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.” - Aberjhani
41. “...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.” - Søren Kierkegaard
42. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” - J.K. Rowling
43. “Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
44. “Sin embargo, conocí a muchos internados que supieron ser fieles a su dignidad humana hasta el mismo fin. Los nazis lograron degradarlos físicamente, pero no fueron capaces de rebajarlos moralmente.Gracias a estos pocos, no he perdido totalmente mi fe en la humanidad. Si en la misma jungla de Birkenau no todos fueron necesariamente inhumanos con sus hermanos hombres, indudablemente hay todavía esperanzas.Esta esperanza es la que me hace vivir.” - Olga Lengyel
45. “...the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.” - Richard K Morgan
46. “You can talk with someone for years, everyday, and still, it won't mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever.... connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.” - C. JoyBell C.
47. “The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.” - Irvin D. Yalom
48. “One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.” - J.K. Rowling
49. “It was the seventh of November, 1918. The war was finally over. Maybe it would be declared a holiday and named War's End Day or something equally hopeful and wrong. Wars would break out again. Violence was part of human nature as much as love and generosity.” - Claire Holden Rothman
50. “Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect. As I have already said, religious fundamentalism was on the rise, but that is not the type of superstition I am referring to. The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes. Even the plainest of events is tied down by a thick tangle of permutation and possibility, but the human mind struggles with such complexity. In times of trouble, when the belief in simple gods breaks down, a cult of conspiracy arises. So it was back then. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst. The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does. This was the true challenge the people of this time faced. The challenge of trusting one another. And they fell short” - Bernard Beckett
51. “Human nature is the same in all professions.” - Laurence Sterne
52. “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.” - Philip Zimbardo
53. “It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
54. “Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled - though as we'll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past. Pull them if you want, but they'll just keep coming back again and again.” - Cacilda Jethá
55. “I find it odd- the greed of mankind. People only like you for as long as they perceive they can get what they want from you. Or for as long as they perceive you are who they want you to be. But I like people for all of their changing surprises, the thoughts in their heads, the warmth that changes to cold and the cold that changes to warmth... for being human. The rawness of being human delights me.” - C. JoyBell C.
56. “And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.” - Mario Puzo
57. “Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.” - Margaret Atwood
58. “You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.” - Hilary Mantel
59. “„Ein Mensch kann niemals Tier werden, er stürzt am Tier vorbei in den Abgrund” - Marlen Haushofer - Die Wand
60. “Seja como for, as pessoas dedicadas à religião não querem reconhecer a realidade que contradiz o seu conto de fadas. Se realmente vivermos num universo sem Deus, elas perdem o emprego. O fluxo de dinheiro estagna.Por outro lado, há pessoas que escolhem viver a sua vida de uma forma completamente egocêntrica e homicida. Essas sentem que, se nada importa e elas podem fazer o que querem sem sofrer consequeências, vão fazê-lo. Mas também podemos ver as coisas de outra maneira: estamos nós e os outros todos, vivos e num barco salva-vidas, e temos de fazer as coisas da maneira mais decente possível para nós e para eles. A mim parece-me que esta seria uma forma de viver muito mais morale "cristã": reconhecermos a terrível verdade da existência humana e, perante isso, ainda escolhermos ser humanos decentes em vez de nos iludirmos sobre a existência de uma qualquer recompensa paradisíaca ou um qualquer castigo infernal. Parecia-me uma atitude muito mais nobre. Se há recompensa, castigo ou qualquer tipo de pagamento e agimos bem, então não estamos a fazer por razões muito nobres - os chamados princípios cristãos. É como os bombistas suicidas que agem alegadamente de acordo com princípios religiosos ou nacionais bastante nobres quando, na verdade, as suas famílias recebem uma recompensa em dinheiro e congratulam-se com um legado heróico - já para não falar da promessa de virgens para os perpetradores, embora me passe completamente ao lado como é que alguém prefere um grupo de virgens a uma mulher altamente experiente.” - Woody Allen
61. “She found it curious and frightening that she could deeply dislike someone she didn’t even know. It wasn’t her. At least, it wasn’t how she used to be.” - Veronica Rossi
62. “Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean when you think about it jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research blood sweat tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.But get on any flight in the country and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who in the face of all that incredible achievement will be willing to complain about the drinks.” - Jim Butcher
63. “Social hierarchy doesn’t hold a candle to the power of feeling isolated in your own skin.” - Elyse Draper
64. “لم يعد يدهشني الظلم ولا الغباء ولا الخوف ولا العناد ولا الجحود ولكن سأبقى دائمًا مندهشًا أمام قدرة الإنسان الفريدة على النسيان. آفة حارتنا.” - بلال فضل
65. “Bizim hepimizin içinde zübüklük olmasa, bizler de birer zübük olmasak, aramızdan böyle zübükler büyüyemezdi. Hepimizde birer parça olan zübüklük birleşip işte başımıza böyle zübükler çıkıyor. Oysa zübüklük bizde, bizim içimizde. Onları biz, kendi zübüklüğümüzden yaratıyoruz. Sonra, kendi zübüklüklerimizin bir tek Zübük’de birleştiğini görünce ona kızıyoruz. Bu zübükler heryerde var, biz zübükler nerde varsak, onlar da orada...” - Aziz Nesin
66. “But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that.” - Stacia Kane
67. “Funny how addiction was socially acceptable—even a status symbol—when it made people extroverts rather than introverts” - Stacia Kane
68. “the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.” - G.K. Chesterton
69. “I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.” - Bertrand Russell
70. “People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.” - George R.R. Martin
71. “Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just” - Michela Wrong
72. “Its complicated, on one level. On another, its the same old stupid story - we aren't enlightened. We disagree, fall in love, and hate eachother, the whole spectrum of human experience. We have differences of opinion, and sometimes, we can't resolve those differences peacefully. If a disagreement goes for long enough, and is important enough, people start to take sides. Once people start to take sides, conflict is inevitable.” - Zachary Rawlins
73. “I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.” - John Wyndham
74. “We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches.” - Yasmine Galenorn
75. “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.” - Sean DeLauder
76. “But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.” - William T. Vollmann
77. “You are the only one who can.” - Carroll Bryant
78. “Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.” - Richard Russo
79. “An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
80. “It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
81. “Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others as long as each hearer thinks that he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but, when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous.” - Thucydides
82. “For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.” - Carl Sagan
83. “... the vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!” - E.A. Bucchianeri
84. “Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.” - Marge Piercy
85. “For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.” - Lin Yutang
86. “If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.” - C. JoyBell C.
87. “Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.” - Thomas Hardy
88. “There’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot…It’s significant…Because somebody has to take them in…And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world…You move out of your isolation and become universal.” - Andre Dubus
89. “We've all got our own brand of crazy.” - Meg Mitchell Moore
90. “Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.” - Georges Bernanos
91. “When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has, in the end, no further object than to raise themselves in the estimation of others; when we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay, even knowledge[1] and art, are striven for only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's fellowmen,—is not this a lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly can go?” - Arthur Schopenhauer
92. “Every time the sky cries, it is because an angel has died... Lucifer started a war in Heaven, and it persists even now. So if God cannot keep his angels under control, what makes you believe that he can keep humanity under control?” - Lionel Suggs
93. “We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.” - William Golding
94. “Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep - but an intruder came, now, that would not "down". It was conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came [...] So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.” - Mark Twain
95. “Ego is the world's worst narcotic” - Mekael Shane
96. “Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.” - Terry Pratchett
97. “The way I see it, the impossible happens all the time; but we're so good at taking it for granted, we forget it was once impossible.” - Neal Shusterman
98. “Our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it’s T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity.” - Martha Char Love
99. “Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.” - Leslie McFarlane
100. “No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.” - Brian Herbert
101. “To visualize that which doesn't exist, yet to believe with confidence that it can be realized, is truly something miraculous.” - Richard Sagor
102. “I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.” - Christopher Marlowe
103. “I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a fact is against them, it's usually because it's the truth. No one tries to step outside of the edge of reason. No one tries to step beyond the edge of the world.” - Lionel Suggs
104. “It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.” - John von Neumann
105. “what we are we potray that in our deeds.....” - Sai Kumar Nayak
106. “Men are not angels,” Akhmar affirmed. “And so men have the chance to be noble, in a way that angels cannot.” - J. Leigh Bralick
107. “The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.” - Robert Buettner
108. “I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born. But he alone can take over the freedom of men who appeases their conscience. With bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience - oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him. That is so, but what came of it? Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it still more for them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all - and who did this? He who came to give his life for them! Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments. You desired the free love of man, that he should follow you freely. seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm ancient law, men had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him as a guide - but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will finally cry out that the truth is not in you, for it was impossible to leave them in greater confusion and torment than you did, abandoning them to so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus you yourself laid the foundation for the destruction of your own kingdom, and do not blame anyone else for it.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
109. “I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom..." & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.” - David Mitchell
