43 Human Nature Quotes

Exploring the intricacies of human nature reveals much about who we are and what motivates us. As complex beings driven by a myriad of emotions, desires, and experiences, understanding ourselves and others can be a lifelong journey. Throughout history, thinkers, writers, and leaders have contemplated the essence of human nature, offering profound insights that continue to resonate today. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 43 quotes that capture the essence of the human experience, offering wisdom, reflection, and a deeper appreciation for our shared humanity.

1. “Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.” - David Orr

2. “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

3. “Recognizing power in another does not diminish your own.” - Joss Whedon

4. “All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.” - Alphonse Karr

5. “Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.” - Aberjhani

6. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott

7. “If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.” - Elizabeth von Arnim

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

9. “Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.” - Aberjhani

10. “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

11. “WHETHER IT'S A CHILD'S TOY OR A NATION'S OIL, IT'S ALL THE SAME, the Red Rider said. YOU FIGHT FOR WHAT YOU WANT. AGGRESSION. IT'S THE SPICE OF LIFE. War was right: people had to fight for what they wanted. Or maybe balance, as Famine has said -- strength matched with temperance. No, she thought. Not balance, Control. IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT CONTROL, War agreed merrily. [as in the meaning of why wars happen]” - Jackie Kessler

12. “Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.” - Edmund Spenser

13. “Human nature is the same in all professions.” - Laurence Sterne

14. “Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled - though as we'll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past. Pull them if you want, but they'll just keep coming back again and again.” - Cacilda Jethá

15. “You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? . . . The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you.” - William Hoffman

16. “لم يعد يدهشني الظلم ولا الغباء ولا الخوف ولا العناد ولا الجحود ولكن سأبقى دائمًا مندهشًا أمام قدرة الإنسان الفريدة على النسيان. آفة حارتنا.” - بلال فضل

17. “They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.” - Émile Zola

18. “I am only human, although I regret it.” - Mark Twain

19. “there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars” - John Green

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

21. “The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.” - Joseph Conrad

22. “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

23. “The human soul is an abyss” - Fernando Pessoa

24. “One man's gospel truth is another man's blasphemous lie. The dangerous thing about people is the way we'll try to kill anyone whose truth doesn't agree with ours.” - Mira Grant

25. “An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.” - Aberjhani

26. “Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image” - Dean Koontz

27. “He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.” - J.K. Rowling

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

29. “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

30. “Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.” - Aberjhani

31. “Free will isn’t always about choice; often weakness plays the game” - Jeyn Roberts

32. “Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.” - Terry Pratchett

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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

37. “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

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

39. “Our thoughts are private to protect others not ourselves. People don't have the ability to handle what you really think about them” - Morena Baloyi

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom..." & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.” - David Mitchell