Human nature has long fascinated philosophers, writers, and thinkers, inspiring countless reflections on what it means to be human. From our deepest instincts to the complexities of our emotions and behaviors, exploring these perspectives can offer profound insights into ourselves and the world around us. In this collection, you’ll find 131 carefully selected quotes that capture the essence of human nature, shedding light on its many facets and inviting you to ponder the truths behind our shared experience.
1. “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.” - John Steinbeck
2. “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.” - Octave Mirbeau
3. “Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.” - Blaise Pascal
4. “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” - Henry David Thoreau
5. “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.” - Chuck Palahniuk
6. “Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.” - Chuck Palahniuk
7. “The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.” - Chuck Palahniuk
8. “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
9. “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
10. “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
11. “There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.” - Vasily Grossman
12. “Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out...” - C.S. Lewis
13. “The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.” - Alan Lightman
14. “The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.” - Alan Lightman
15. “…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
16. “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.” - Virginia Woolf
17. “Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.” - Michel de Montaigne
18. “Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. ” - Hermann Hesse
19. “Get to know two things about a man. How he earns his money and how he spends it. You will then have the clue to his character. You will have a searchlight that shows up the inmost recesses of his soul. You know all you need to know about his standards, his motives, his driving desires, his real religion.” - Robert J. McCracken
20. “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
21. “I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.” - Steve Martin
22. “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
23. “[There's] one... thing I can tell you about human nature: beautiful people are the last ones you want to befriend. Beautiful people float through life thinking that it's perfectly normal for others to gaze at them adoringly, and open doors for them, and defer to their opinion... Doesn't anyone understand that beautiful people are stupid? That's why nature made them beautiful, so they'd have a chance at surviving in the wild. And how do they survive? They use people and then they drop people, and they float away on the currents of their own gorgeousness to the next poor girl who thinks that being friends with a beutiful person will somehow make her beautiful, too. I've got news for you: Hanging around beautiful people just makes you uglier by comparison.” - Amy Kathleen Ryan
24. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott
25. “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
26. “Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.” - Willa Cather
27. “If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer
28. “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
29. “The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.” - Daniel Goleman
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. “You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.” - Wystan Hugh Auden
32. “Today we know more about Jupiter than the guy who lives next door to us. We can predict where an election will go, we can turn a gene on or off, and we can even send a robot to Mars, but we are lost if asked to explain or predict the phenomena we might expect to know the most about, the actions of our fellow humans.” - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
33. “Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.” - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
34. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” - George Carlin
35. “One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
36. “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.” - J.D. Salinger
37. “Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.” - Alain De Botton
38. “ Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.” - Andrew Sullivan
39. “I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human.” - C. JoyBell C.
40. “Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.” - Aberjhani
41. “The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition” - Tagore Rabindranath
42. “After 49 years of marriage, isn’t it amazing when you can look at your partner sound asleep next to you and still believe they have potential.” - Kaylin McFarren
43. “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
44. “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?” - Robert Ardrey
45. “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
46. “Function? Why function? Who needs more functioning human beings? It's really quite astounding, if you ask me, the sheer quantity of normal in the world today. I think that's the real horror of modern life.” - James Greer
47. “...the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.” - Richard K Morgan
48. “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.
49. “My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.” - D.H. Lawrence
50. “and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.” - Ruskin Bond
51. “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
52. “Human nature is the same in all professions.” - Laurence Sterne
53. “After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.” - Anton Chekhov
54. “There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.” - Saul Bellow
55. “From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.” - Criss Jami
56. “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
57. “Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.” - Dan Brown
58. “Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.” - Ellis Peters
59. “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
60. “And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.” - Julian Barnes
61. “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
62. “Oh what a wonderful soul so bright inside you. Got power to heal the sun’s broken heart, power to restore the moon’s vision too.” - Aberjhani
63. “¿Se han preguntado alguna vez qué es lo que convierte en responsables a los hombres? Yo se lo diré: que solo tienen una oportunidad de hacer cada cosa. Si existieran máquinas que nos permitieran corregir hasta nuestros errores más estúpidos viviríamos en un mundo lleno de irresponsables.” - Félix J. Palma
64. “Alles, was der Mensch tut, unvollkommen ist. Aber wer will sich schon seine Unvollkommenheit eingestehen?” - Adelbert von Chamisso
65. “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
66. “Funny how addiction was socially acceptable—even a status symbol—when it made people extroverts rather than introverts” - Stacia Kane
67. “the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.” - G.K. Chesterton
68. “It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion.” - Hermann Hesse
69. “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.” - Christian Smith
70. “The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.” - Joseph Conrad
71. “I am only human, although I regret it.” - Mark Twain
72. “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.” - John Holt
73. “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
74. “Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ...Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.” - Terry Pratchett
75. “I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.” - Kim Ki-duk
76. “Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...” - richard wright
77. “You can trust everyone to be human, with all the quirks and inconsistencies we humans display, including disloyalty, dishonesty and downright treachery. We are all capable of the entire range of human behavior, given the circumstances, from absolute saintliness to abject depravity. Trusting someone to limit their sphere of action to one narrow band on the spectrum is idealistic and will inevitably lead to disappointment.On the other hand, you can decide to trust that everyone is doing their best according to their particular stage of development, and to give everyone their appropriate berth. For this to work, you have to trust yourself to make and have made the right choices that will lead you on the path to your healthy growth. You have to trust yourself to come through every experience safely and enriched. But don’t trust what I am saying. Listen and then decide for yourself. Does this information sit easily in your belly? You know when you trust yourself around someone because your belly feels settled and your heart feels warm.” - Stephen Russell
78. “Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?” - Bret Easton Ellis
79. “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
80. “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
81. “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
82. “Most distinguishable about the idiot, Hedge noted, was their fear of that which was different. Those who feared difference always made a point of finding difference in others in order to feel more secure in their sameness.” - Sean DeLauder
83. “The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture—exploit the new thing then move on.There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.Reading is where the wild things are.” - Jeanette Winterson
84. “What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?” - S.J. Watson
85. “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
86. “Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
87. “You are the only one who can.” - Carroll Bryant
88. “Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.” - Sue Grafton
89. “Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.” - Richard Kadrey
90. “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
91. “We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.” - Johann Baptist Metz
92. “The human soul is an abyss” - Fernando Pessoa
93. “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
94. “They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.” - Thomas Hardy
95. “Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.” - Thomas Hardy
96. “Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.” - Kurt Vonnegut
97. “You can spend your life judging people or, you can spend it making friends. Take your pick.” - Carroll Bryant
98. “What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.” - Irene Nemirovsky
99. “Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.” - E.M. Forster
100. “It is human nature to try hardest to accomplish the very thing we are told is impossible. Why? Because innately we know that nothing's impossible.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
101. “I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.” - Steven Pinker
102. “There is such a thing as righteous judgment, but it seems that lately the word 'judgment' has become a curse word, period. The issue isn't whether or not we're insightful enough to avoid being judgmental, but whether or not we're secure enough to accept being judged. It is inevitable for every conscious human being to judge. It may spring from insight and experience and sincerity, and in such cases, it is quite beneficial on the receiving end.” - Criss Jami
103. “Kur es galu galā biju iekļuvis? Es jutos kā mājās, kā savējo vidū. Te jau viss norisinājās uz mata tāpat kā pie mums, latviešiem! Ķildas, izstāšanās, izslēgšanas, sūdzības, draudi… Raug, ne jau mēs, latvieši, vien esam tie ķildīgie un kašķīgie! Visas pasaules tautas šinī ziņā bija vienādas!… Vienīgā starpība bija tā, ka šeit, saskaitušies, ļaudis viens otru nesaukāja par komūnistiem. Bet rietumnieki jau komūnismu un komūnistus nepazina tik labi kā mēs.” - Anšlavs Eglītis
104. “In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.” - Aberjhani
105. “Já reparou que só a morte desperta nossos sentimentos? Como amamos os amigos que acabam de deixar-nos, não acha?! Como admiramos nossos mestres que já não falam mais, que estão com a boca cheia de terra! A homenagem vem, então, muito naturalmente, essa mesma homenagem que talvez tivessem esperado de nós durante a vida inteira. Mas sabe por que somos sempre mais justos e mais generosos para com os mortos? A razão é simples! Em relação a eles, já não há obrigações. Deixam-nos livres, podemos dispor de nosso tempo, encaixar a homenagem entre o coquetel e uma doce amante: em resumo, nas horas vagas. Se nos impusessem algo, seria a memória, e nós temos a memória curta. Não é o morto recente que nós amamos em nossos amigos, o morto doloroso, nossa emoção, enfim, nós mesmos![...] É assim o homem, caro senhor, com duas faces: não consegue amar sem se amar. Observe seus vizinhos, se por acaso ocorrer um falecimento no prédio. Adormecidos em sua vidinha, e eis que morre o porteiro. Despertam imediatamente, agitam-se, informa-se, enchem-se de compaixão. Um morto no prelo e o espetáculo começa, finalmente. Eles têm necessidade de tragédia que se pode fazer? - é sua pequena transcendência, é seu aperitivo. Será, aliás, por acaso que lhe falo em porteiro? Eu tinha um, que era uma verdadeira desgraça, a maldade em pessoa, um monstro de insignificância e de rancor que faria desanimar um franciscano. Eu nem sequer lhe dirigia a palavra, mas, por sua própria existência, ele comprometia minha satisfação habitual. Morreu, e eu fui a seu enterro. Será capaz de me dizer por quê?” - Albert Camus
106. “Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.” - Zora Neale Hurston
107. “I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
108. “It’ll turn me into a weapon,’ I say, my voice suddenly loud. ‘All you got to do is curl your hands into fists and you turn into a weapon,’ says Jim. ‘Your body is just another tool. This technology changes nothing; it only amplifies. You decide how to use your tools. Whether to do good or evil.” - Daniel H. Wilson
109. “What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.” - David Wong
110. “Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.” - Isabel Allende
111. “Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.” - Terry Pratchett
112. “Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding to door when it is really coming up through the floorboards. Real dark forces... aren't dark. They're sort of gray, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the color out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no one wants to live and no one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes gray and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic...” - Terry Pratchett
113. “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
114. “There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.” - George R.R. Martin
115. “As much as I don't care about those things, I think it's human nature to not want to feel totally insignificant.” - Megan McCafferty
116. “schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
117. “To visualize that which doesn't exist, yet to believe with confidence that it can be realized, is truly something miraculous.” - Richard Sagor
118. “Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.” - Otsuichi
119. “History is a record of human nature in action.” - James Carlos Blake
120. “I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.” - Lauren DeStefano
121. “Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?”He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.“No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right—that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.” - Karen Maitland
122. “It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield” - William Butler Yeats
123. “what we are we potray that in our deeds.....” - Sai Kumar Nayak
124. “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
125. “...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.” - Dianna Hardy
126. “Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroying, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were he in the tyrant's place, would intensify the torments of his enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed everyday on his orders. Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] Mandeville has a clear awareness that, with all their mores, men would never have been anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to aid their reason; but he has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that he wants to deny in men. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy?” - Jean Jacques Rousseau
127. “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
128. “He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.” - G.K. Chesterton
129. “We all know the true nature of the human soul, because we have all looked into the eyes of children, and saw ourselves looking back.” - Bryant McGill
130. “পৃথিবীতে ২ ধরনের মানুষে আছে। এক ধরনের মানুষ রাগ প্রকাশ করতে পারে, খুশি প্রকাশ করতে পারে না, আরেক ধরনের মানুষ খুশি প্রকাশ করতে পারে, রাগ প্রকাশ করতে পারে না ” - হুমায়ুন আহমেদ
131. “Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?” - David Mitchell
