c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
As a general rule...people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.
— Alexandre Dumas
Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.
— Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
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, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
— Simone Weil
In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
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
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
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, The Screwtape Letters
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, I is for Innocent
You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
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, A Place For My Head
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
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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, The Casual Vacancy
We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.
— Michael Crichton, Prey
All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.
— Alphonse Karr
Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.
— Camille Paglia
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 m
— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
— Blaise Pascal
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, Under the Never Sky
...tell them that we have some good in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. That’s why we’ve got to make sure we pass it on.
— Billie Letts, Where the Heart Is
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, Status Anxiety
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
— G.K. Chesterton
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.
— Nick Hornby, How to Be Good
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
— Mark Twain
Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
— Mark Twain
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, The Secret of the Universe
Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?--TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature--a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas
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, Summer Knight
Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.
— Ken Follett, Winter of the World
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, Leviathan
If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.
— Kathrine Switzer, 26.2: Marathon Stories
Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
— Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order
Human nature is the same in all professions.
— Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
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, Thérèse Raquin
[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, Vibes
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, How the Mind Works
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, Stargirl
If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.
— Henry Ward Beecher
One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal
Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David's family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved best.
— Liz Moore, The Unseen World
One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
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, Anarchism and Other Essays
It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.
— Franz Kafka
It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.
— Thomas More, Utopia
I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
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, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
You are the only one who can.
— Carroll Bryant
We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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.
In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
What's with all the cheering over the apocalypse, anyway? Oh, yay, we get to kill poor helpless humans.""The excitement over the apocalypse had nothing to do with humans.""Could have fooled me.""Humans are incidental.""Killing and destroying an entire species is incidental?" I can't help but sound like I'm accusing him (Raffe), even though I know he wasn't part of the plan to wipe us out.Or at least, I think he wasn't personally involved, but I don't really know that, do I?"Your people have been doing it to all kinds of species.""That's not the same.""Why not?
— Susan Ee, World After
The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
There are springs in the mind from which others cannot drink.
— Clay Griffith, The Greyfriar
But the people only talked about how ugly her face looked. No one even bothered to mention what a sweet, kindhearted girl she was. Now, don’t be amazed! That is just the nature of humans, to notice the one flaw among a person’s ten good qualities.
— Janaki Sooriyarachchi, The Ugly Princess
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
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-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
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-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
...everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
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, Killosophy
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.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Looters become looted, while time and tide make us mercenaries all.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
... the vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 2
You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.
— Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe
...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, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.
— Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
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
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, The Failure
He's got a can up there,' Richard said.
— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
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, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.
— Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
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, Blackout
Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology
…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, How to Make an American Quilt
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, The Speaker for the Trees
I shall love my kind of love anyway, doggedly, for I must certainly do the best I can with my own nature and if my nature is to love too well or from afar or to be grateful for crumbs...well, so be it.
— Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog
And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.
— Mario Puzo, The Godfather
I am only human, although I regret it.
— Mark Twain
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
— Iain Banks, The Bridge
The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.
— Samuel Johnson
Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
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, England, England
...the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.
— Richard K. Morgan, The Steel Remains
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, My Mortal Enemy
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, Naked on the Moon
Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.
— Peter Morgan
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, The Academy
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, The Speaker for the Trees
For Mercy has a human heart;Pity, a human face;And Love, the human form divine:And Peace the human dress.Songs of InnocenceCruelty has a human heartAnd jealousy a human face,Terror the human form divine,And secrecy the human dress.The human dress is forged iron,The human form a fiery forge,The human face a furnace seal'd,The human heart its hungry gorge.Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously.
— William Blake
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
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, The Kraken Wakes
It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history.
— Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable
It is only dogs that never bite their masters.
— Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March
The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage-who can tell?-but truth-truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder-the man know, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet the truth with his own true stuff-with his own inborn strength.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer
Humans are naturally social; civilization causes us to be antisocial."From my next book: The Five Forgotten Truths
— Kirk D. Sinclair
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, You Bright and Risen Angels
On various occasions, especially in trying to think of western American history in the context of the worldwide history of colonialism, it has struck me that much of the mental behavior that we sometimes denounce as ethnocentrism and cultural insensitivity actually derives less from our indifference or hostility than from our clumsiness and awkwardness when we leave the comfort of the English language behind... [V]enturing outside the bounds of the English language exercises and stretches our minds in ways that are essential for getting as close as we can to the act of seeing the world from what would otherwise remain unfamiliar and alien perspectives.
— Patricia Nelson Limerick, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
If you look at their intentions, examine their motives, and scrutinize what brings them contentment – how can people hide who they are? How can they hide who they really are?
— Confucius, The Analects
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
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, Gulliver's Travels
Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
— Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool
as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being 'one of the meanest' members of the entire Peanuts cast ... he is lazy, he is a 'chow-hound' without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic, he is frequently a coward, and he often becomes quite weary of being what he is basically -- a dog. He is, in other words, a fairly drawn caricature for what is probably the typical Christian.
— Robert L. Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts
All growth toward perfection is but a returning to original existence.
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt
An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
Social hierarchy doesn’t hold a candle to the power of feeling isolated in your own skin.
— Elyse Draper, Freewill
Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. 'We have a right to know what's going on!' she cried.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
How wrong and petty any life is.
— David Wojahn, Mystery Train
Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, - men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their candles; and their descendant to this day always acts as if the house were his camp, - wears his hat at all hours, tumbles himself about, and puts his heels on the tops of chairs or mantel-pieces, just as his father rolled on the green sward, and put his upon trees or logs, - keep all the windows and doors open, winter and summer, that he may get air enough for his great lungs, - calls everybody "stranger", with nonchalant bonhommie, and is altogether the frankest, easiest, most jovial creature living.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
People who have suffered understand pain and are often the best at helping others.
— Nadia Fezzani, Real Life Super Heroes
Human nature must be something which always remains one and the same, but which may be carried out in manifold ways.
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt
. . .for in natures, as in seas, depth answers unto depth
— Charles Dickens, Hard Times
An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
If a man couldn’t control his beast, it could turn so violent that nothing could restrain it once enraged.
— Eka Kurniawan, Man Tiger
You look into it , the object flies off into air , your reasons evaporate , the criminal is not to be found , the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom , something like the toothache , for which no one is to blame , and consequently there is only the same outlet left again — that is , to beat the wall as hard as you can . So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause . And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings , blindly , without reflection , without a primary cause , repelling consciousness at least for a time ; hate or love , if only not to sit with your hands folded . The day after tomorrow , at the latest , you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself . Result : a soap - bubble and inertia . Oh , gentlemen , do you know , perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man , only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything .
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Sitting now...with my eyes wide open and full with amazement...I m realising that there is nothing else more volatile in this universe than human nature. I am a killer? No. I am a lover. I am a lover? No, a pragmatic poet bussines woman. I am happy. Yes. And angry. One second ago, I was sad. Now I am enthusiastic. I wanted to be a man. But I love being a woman.
— Dragotel Viorica
Sitting now...with my eyes wide open...I am simply amazed about human nature and its volatility...I am a killer. I am so aggressive. No, I am a lover. Love is the key. Acctually...I am a poet. And a pragmatic business woman. I was sad. And angry. But I am enthusiastic. I wanted to be a man. But I love being a woman.
— Dragotel Viorica
Everyone must look out for himself, and the best time is had by those who're best able to decieve themselves.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Frankly, the only good people who I know are dogs.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.
— David Morrell, First Blood
I know enough about human nature to know that people generally prefer to find the most corrupt way of doing things possible, given enough incentive.
— Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones Ascent
There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human being who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.
— Dennis Prager, Dennis Prager: Volume I
There are instances, indeed, wherein men shew a vanity in resembling a great man in his countenance, shape, air, or other minute circumstances, that contribute not in any degree to his reputation; but it must be confess’d, that this extends not very far, nor is of any considerable moment in these affections. For this I assign the following reason. We can never have a vanity of resembling in trifles any person, unless he be possess’d of very shining qualities, which give us a respect and veneration for him. These qualities, then, are, properly speaking, the causes of our vanity, by means of their relation to ourselves. Now after what manner are they related to ourselves? They are parts of the person we value, and consequently connected with these trifles; which are also suppos’d to be parts of him. These trifles are connected with the resembling qualities in us; and these qualities in us, being parts, are connected with the whole; and by that means form a chain of several links betwixt ourselves and the shining qualities of the person we resemble. But besides that this multitude of relations must weaken the connexion; ’tis evident the mind, in passing from the shining qualities to the trivial ones, must by that contrast the better perceive the minuteness of the latter, and be in some measure asham’d of the comparison and resemblance.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
People are like mussels. You can put them in a vat of boiling water, and some of them will pop open immediately. Some of them will have to float around in the water for a bit, then they’ll slowly release. Others never open up at all, no matter what sort of hot water they’re in.
— Rhian J. Martin, A Different Familiar
Philanderers and swingers can see nothing beyond the needs of their genitals. Sexual craving is a part of our biology, but it is not who we are.
— Abhijit Naskar, Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy
Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control.
— Abhijit Naskar, Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy
Being Good and Lazy human is Deadly combination.
— Talees Rizvi
People are not hooked on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook but on each other. Tools and services come and go; what is constant is our human urge to share.
— Alfred Hermida, Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters