149 Human Nature Quotes

Human nature is a timeless subject that has fascinated philosophers, writers, and thinkers for centuries. It encompasses the myriad emotions, actions, and thoughts that define our existence. In an attempt to understand this complex and intricate subject, we often turn to the wisdom encapsulated in quotes. These concise reflections can offer profound insights into our behavior, our motivations, and our relationships with one another. In this collection, we’ve curated 149 of the most thought-provoking human nature quotes to inspire, challenge, and enlighten you. Whether you're seeking a deeper understanding of yourself or simply wish to ponder the intricacies of humanity, these quotes are sure to resonate.

1. “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” - Albert Camus

2. “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

3. “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

4. “Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.” - Peter Morgan

5. “All sins are attempts to fill voids.” - Simone Weil

6. “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” - Sigmund Freud

7. “Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.” - Blaise Pascal

8. “You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.” - Chuck Palahniuk

9. “Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.” - Chuck Palahniuk

10. “Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.” - H.G. Wells

11. “On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” - George Orwell

12. “...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

13. “--¿Qué es ser hombre, para vos?--Es muchas cosas, pero para mí... bueno, lo más lindo del hombre es eso, ser lindo, fuerte, pero sin hacer alharaca de fuerza, y que va avanzando seguro. Que camine seguro, como mi mozo, que hable sin miedo, que sepa lo que quiere, adonde va, sin miedo de nada.” - Manuel Puig

14. “In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone.” - Sophie Kinsella

15. “The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.” - Alan Lightman

16. “I live in an ocean of smell…” - Rebecca Wells

17. “Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.” - Claude Levi-Strauss

18. “We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.” - Ernst Jünger

19. “Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters, and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station in life. They did the jobs they were paid to do more or less competently,. They were as happy with their wives as are most married couples. They led humdrum lives and did very much the same things every day. Sometimes by way of a change they got a little shooting; but at a rule, after they had done their day's work, they played tennis if there were people to play with, went to the club at sundown if there was a club in the vicinity, drank in moderation, and played bridge. They had their little tiffs, their little jealousies, their little flirtations, their little celebrations. They were good, decent, normal people.I respect, and even admire, such people, but they are not the sort of people I can write stories about. I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception.” - W. Somerset Maugham

20. “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.” - Joss Whedon

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. “I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.” - Steve Martin

23. “Learning to live on less pride has been a great investment in my future.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

24. “We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.” - J.B. Priestley

25. “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

26. “[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

27. “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

28. “In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.” - Aberjhani

29. “This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.” - Aberjhani

30. “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.

31. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” - George Carlin

32. “All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.” - David M. Eagleman

33. “As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.” - Charles W. Chesnutt

34. “An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner.The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself.” - Immanuel Kant

35. “Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.” - Isaac Asimov

36. “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

37. “Every death even the cruelest deathdrowns in the total indifference of NatureNature herself would watch unmovedif we destroyed the entire human raceI hate Naturethis passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-facethat can bear everythingthis goads us to greater and greater acts” - Peter Weiss

38. “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” - Kurt Vonnegut

39. “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

40. “There are springs in the mind from which others cannot drink.” - Clay Griffith

41. “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.

42. “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.

43. “Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.” - Steven Pinker

44. “The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition” - Tagore Rabindranath

45. “On the whole, all people are good, or at least they're normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.” - Natsume Soseki

46. “...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

47. “Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts.” - Clarence Day

48. “Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

49. “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

50. “To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.” - Brian Christian

51. “For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.” - Thomas Hobbes

52. “Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.” - Levitt & Dubner

53. “That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.” - A.S. Byatt

54. “You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day. It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.” - Jerry Spinelli

55. “A morning coffee is my favorite way of starting the day, settling the nerves so that they don't later fray.” - Marcia Carrington

56. “The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.” - Oscar Wilde

57. “If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

58. “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

59. “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

60. “The only problem with her is that she is too perfect. She is bad in a way that entices, and good in a way that comforts. She is mischief but then she is the warmth of home. The dreams of the wild and dangerous but the memories of childhood and gladness. She is perfection. And when given something perfect, it is the nature of man to dedicate his mind to finding something wrong with it and then when he is able to find something wrong with it, he rejoices in his find, and sees only the flaw, becoming blind to everything else! And this is why man is never given anything that is perfect, because when given the imperfect and the ugly, man will dedicate his mind to finding what is good with the imperfect and upon finding one thing good with the extremely flawed, he will only see the one thing good, and no longer see everything that is ugly. And so....man complains to God for having less than what he wants... but this is the only thing that man can handle. Man cannot handle what is perfect. It is the nature of the mortal to rejoice over the one thing that he can proudly say that he found on his own, with no help from another, whether it be a shadow in a perfect diamond, or a faint beautiful reflection in an extremely dull mirror.” - C. JoyBell C.

61. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” - Virginia Woolf

62. “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

63. “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.

64. “- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.” - Peter S. Beagle

65. “From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.” - Criss Jami

66. “But in my growth and development, I knew I wanted more. And more. Oh, God. So much more. It's what being human is all about.” - James Lusarde

67. “How wrong and petty any life is.” - David Wojahn

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

69. “Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.” - Dan Brown

70. “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

71. “So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.” - Orson Scott Card

72. “Aber ich gestehe, ein wenig gefiel es mir doch, daß man mich für eine so hohe Persönlichkeit hielt.” - Adelbert von Chamissoo

73. “The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.” - Mark Twain

74. “He had been dazzled. Because of the dazzling brightness, he had had to kill [Seigen]. All who had encountered Seigen had had their hearts stolen by that brightness. That envy had turned to malice.” - Takayuki Yamaguchi

75. “Funny how addiction was socially acceptable—even a status symbol—when it made people extroverts rather than introverts” - Stacia Kane

76. “He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” - Jonathan Swift

77. “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” - Seth Godin

78. “People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.” - George R.R. Martin

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?” - Bret Easton Ellis

84. “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

85. “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

86. “What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?” - S.J. Watson

87. “Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

88. “Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” - Michel de Montaigne

89. “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

90. “It is only dogs that never bite their masters.” - Thornton Wilder

91. “Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.” - Richard Kadrey

92. “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

93. “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

94. “... the vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

95. “The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings.” - W.G. Sebald

96. “Ordinary life did not stop just because kings rose and fell, Mosca realized. People adapted. If the world turned upside down, everyone ran and hid in their houses, but a very short while later, if all seemed quiet, they came out again and started selling each other potatoes.” - Frances Hardinge

97. “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

98. “Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.” - Kurt Vonnegut

99. “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

100. “What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.” - Edith Wharton

101. “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

102. “A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar.” - Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

103. “Distance reflects the true intensity of the relationship.. Some people come too close & Some forgets that u exist too..” - Vineet Upadhyay

104. “For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.” - Hermann Hesse

105. “No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how monogamy comes "naturally" to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers- even presidential legacies- for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.” - Christopher Ryan

106. “Ten minutes ago, Frank though he was going to prison. Now he knows he’s not, and part of him thinks he should just be glad he’s getting out of this at all, but he’s not. He’s not glad. He’s furious. He’s known the world is broken for a long time, he’s known that, but sometimes he’s amazed at how broken; even now, at this point in his life, nearing fifty years old, he can stumble across something that makes him realize all over again that the world is not only broken, but beyond fixing. No amount of glue can ever make it right. And yet, you have to focus on your little part of it, don’t you? You have to focus on your little corner of the world and glue what cracks you can. Otherwise there’s no hope at all.” - Ryan David Jahn

107. “Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.” - Georges Bernanos

108. “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

109. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.” - Sigmund Freud

110. “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

111. “It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspiciousof swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountainclimbers.” - Yann Martel

112. “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

113. “Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.” - Zora Neale Hurston

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “Seni sama pentingnya dengan matematika. Seni memanusiakan manusia. Seni menciptakan rasa empati” - Wahyu Aditya

118. “If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.” - Ludwig Feuerbach

119. “If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.” - Saul Bellow

120. “Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.” - Isabel Allende

121. “Ego is the world's worst narcotic” - Mekael Shane

122. “To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.” - Leon Eisenberg

123. “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

124. “Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat” - Gregory B. Sadler

125. “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.” - H.L. Mencken

126. “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

127. “Human hypocrisy: When one judges humanity as a whole, people have the habit of disagreeing, saying that everyone is different - unique. Yet people turn around and say that at the end of the day, everyone is the same. Ladies and gentlemen, the joyful paradoxical nature of humanity. If you really want to dismiss the paradox, show me that your an imaginary number, rather than a real number.” - Lionel Suggs

128. “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

129. “There’s something about human nature which draws us to people who are authentic and makes us want to repel those that aren’t.” - Rachael Bermingham

130. “It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.” - Tom Hiddleston

131. “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

132. “Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.” - Lawrence Block

133. “I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.” - Christopher Marlowe

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “what we are we potray that in our deeds.....” - Sai Kumar Nayak

139. “Planetologist call it the conundrum of unforeseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling. She clasped both hands like a child hammering. WHACK! We change something here. Oops, that makes another problem pop up there where we didn't expect it. WHACK! So, we whack that mole. Oops! We're so smart that we're a menace.” - Robert Buettner

140. “One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it 'lying.” - Robert Buettner

141. “No doubt, humans will do a lot of damage before we ultimately destroy ourselves. But life will continue without humans. New forms of intelligence will emerge long after this human experiment is over.” - Zeena Schreck

142. “...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.” - Dianna Hardy

143. “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

144. “He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.” - G.K. Chesterton

145. “It is easier for a man to burn down his own house than to get rid of his prejudices.” - Roger Bacon

146. “By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.” - Russell Kirk

147. “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

148. “Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.” - Josephine Tey

149. “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