c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When the sands of time come falling down, we are only left with our choices. Choose wisely; however, some may argue wisdom is relative.
— Virginia Vayna
When people run out of probable things to do, they do improbable things.
— Joseph Hansen, Skinflick
I wish I knew all the answers, how to be perfect, attractive and witty. But I’m just a human being with all the regular faults and it seems no matter how hard I try, I can’t change that.
— Rebekah Joy Anast, Holy Cow
There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one’s very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself.
— Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics
Love. Passion. Belief. Duty. The lines blur sometomes. There are ove fifteen recognised mjor religions on this planet. One religion believes something different from another, and yet so often it's just the same thing with a different name, or a different form of worship, or a different headdress. But they will fight to protect what they believe in, no matter the cost. You've been here a while Jack. How many wars, how many lives squandered on religion. Then we get to science. Science versus creationism for instance. Two opposing stances on the same subject, neither of which has evidence to back it up
— Gary Russell, The Twilight Streets
You know what kind of a man Lonny Tooker is? The kind of a man that sets broken bird's wings.""Hitler loved dogs and babies," Dave said.
— Joseph Hansen, Skinflick
We see the world not as it is, but as we are.~Dag Redwing Hickory Bluefield
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Passage
When you're young you think you know it all, when you're old you wish you could remember it all.
— T.A. Uner
Since then I have searched for my heroes among small-t truths. I always find them among people learning the art of acceptance: not acceptance of defeat or acceptance of some inability to influence their own futures, but rather acceptance of life on the planet, acceptance of the grays rather than the black-and-whites, acceptance of the astonishing range of human emotion and human behavior.
— Chris Crutcher, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography
Even the most outspoken of the critics must admit that long before we had print and film media to "spread the word," mankind was engaged in all forms of cruel and despicable behavior. To attribute war, killing, and violence to film, TV, and role-play games is to fly in the face of thousands of years of recorded history.
— Gary Gygax, Role-Playing Mastery
I wasn't sure which I appreciated less—the insincere concern or the genuine indifference.
— Arthur  Graham, Editorial
- You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
— Richard Russo, Straight Man
What is perfect, anyway? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don’t want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.
— Allie Burke, Paper Souls
I do not think men are good at all. I have seen enough to know that humans are a wicked race from their very birth. Selfishness defines us. Greed and lust motivate us. And even the best man who ever lived would lie to preserve his own life or beliefs. No, mankind is far from being essentially good. It takes exceptional individuals to change the world, to make a difference. Give the average person a choice, and he will make life miserable for others if only it will make his own life easier.
— Brondt Kamffer, The Scion of Abacus, Part 4
I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.
— Sigmund Freud
Why do people, when they are wrong, twist the conversation around and place the blame on someone else?
— Hilary Grossman, Dangled Carat
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
— Russell Banks, Trailerpark
The day of the week on which the tour took place was known to all workers. All devices in its path ought to have been carefully neutralized or locked, since it was unreasonable to expect human beings to withstand the temptation to handle knobs, keys, handles and pushbuttons.
— Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions
An ugly smile. An ugly soul.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
Strange, how in all those apocalyptic movies, when their society breaks down into lawlessness and anarchy, Canada is always the haven of safety, the place people want to escape to.
— Jenifer Mohammed, Resurrecting Cybele
Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.
— William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization
Things to know from books to read
— Kip Koehler
Reason has always been obliterated by the sensation of profound solitude, perhaps that is why we replace the aching of isolation with the anguish of abuse.
— Elyse Draper, Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror 2013
While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distanced between Marx's predicted communist society and the form taken by 'communism' in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx's misconception of the flexibility of human nature.
— Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction
We must consider what Miss. Fairfax quits, before we condemn her taste for what she goes to.
— Jane Austen, Emma
She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.
— Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story
We're all so afraid of what everyone around us thinks that we risk ourselves to desperation. It's utterly stupid. It's utterly frightening. But it's utterly human.
— Fisher Amelie, Greed
An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' bout you just what they hope done happened.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.
— Spike Milligan, Puckoon
...the best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us. This doesn't mean that we should do what others expect us to do, but it helps us to understand ourselves better.
— Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man
— John le Carré, Call for the Dead
Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
— John le Carré, Call for the Dead
Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory. It is the companion that dogs our every step.
— Alain Finkielkraut
As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.
— Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary on the Bible - Enhanced Version
He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.
— John le Carré, Call for the Dead
Please look at the imperfect human being God gave to love you once, and try to like me a little for what I really was, or, God willing, am. Then please, darling, become an imperfect human being among imperfect human beings again.""Jenny
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction
Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.
— Pindar, The Odes
The voice of human nature is nothing but one prolonged cry.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask
Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture – although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell this ship. Your talents were underrated.
— David Brin, Startide Rising
he knew that men were too complex to be defined by the worst moment in their lives
— Richard North Patterson, The Spire
friends are thieves of time
— sajjad ali noor
his legacy, if there is one, is that I try to do my best to see people whole, for who they are and what they've been through. especially those who matters to me
— Richard North Patterson, The Spire
The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
I consider Anarchism the most beautiful and practical philosophy that has yet been thought of in its application to individual expression and the relation it establishes between the individual and society. Moreover, I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. It is my conviction that dictatorship, whether to the right or to the left, can never work--that it never has worked, and that time will prove this again, as it has been proved before. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes more apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated. Considered from this point, a recrudescence of Anarchist ideas in the near future is very probable. When this occurs and takes effect, I believe that humanity will at last leave the maze in which it is now lost and will start on the path to sane living and regeneration through freedom.
— Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks
No, I mean, this is a problem that most people have. A problem of the human condition. We get ahold of some kind of shorthand in understanding people, and we think it works, and we use it to assess, categorize, and then, very often, dismiss people. It's the basis for stereotyping, profiling, and several other very sorry words that end in i-n-g.
— Phillip DePoy, A Corpse's Nightmare
...the enduring human need to be remembered.
— Ben Sherwood, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud
That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.
— Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas
After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.
— Victor Hugo
Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature.
— Nocturnus Libertus
Hopefully, someday we will both realize that despite our sharp differences, you and I have more in common than we think.
— Ray Bourhis, Revolt: The Secession of Mill Valley
[For] decades, researchers have told us that the link between cataclysm and social disintegration is a myth perpetuated by movies, fiction, and misguided journalism. In fact, in case after case, the opposite occurs: In the earthquake and fire of 1906, Jack London observed: "never, in all San Francisco's history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror." "We did not panic. We coped," a British psychiatrist recalled after the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings. We often assume that such humanity among survivors, what author Rebecca Solnit has called "a paradise built in hell," is an exception after catastrophes, specific to a particular culture or place. In fact, it is the rule.
— Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways. Some people have dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but must merely avoid becoming their victim. You are an observer of the human comedy, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary
— Robert Greene, Mastery
Chava," he said, "it's a cruel irony that you have the most difficulty precisely when those around you are on their best behavior. I suspect you would find it much easier if we all cast politeness aside, and took whatever we pleased." She considered. "It would be easier, at first. But then you might hurt each other to gain your wishes, and grow afraid of each other, and still go on wanting.
— Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni
...suddenly I got shivers down my spine thinking about how many different people one and the same person can be.
— Janne Teller, Nothing
Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.
— Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living
Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
People are attracted more towards bad things because being good has been turned into a boring duty. No adrenaline & dopamine rush, no rewards!
— Saurabh Sharma
There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.
— Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
— Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background
Books are only half our job 
—  the other half is human nature.
People are crazy and times are strangeI'm locked in tight, I'm out of rangeI used to care, but things have changed
— Bob Dylan
Do not be dismayed to learn there is a bit of the devil in you. There is a bit of the devil in us all.
— Arthur Byron Cover
I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop.
— M.B. Dallocchio, Quixote in Ramadi: An Indigenous Account of Imperialism
The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.
— Thomas Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament
Human beings may be inconsistent, but human nature is true to itself
— John Jakes
Improvement is always on the schedule for tomorrow. Change is always taking place some time in the future. It’s human nature.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
...there is something demoniac in human nature that we are unable to stop revering.
— Adam Nevill, Last Days
Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All.
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
The illusion that humans possess free will is compounded by the inherent randomness of the universe. Chaos disguised as freedom of choice...
— Henry Lindell
Mr. Cat and Mr. Dog were neighbors who fought like, well, cats and dogs. That is until Mr. Rat moved in. It's fascinating how easily two enemies ally at the introduction of a third.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Nature is infinitely rich and diverse in her ways. She can be seen to break her most unchanging laws. She has made self-interest the motive of all human action, but in the great host of men she produces ones who are strangely constituted, in whom selfishness is scarcely perceptible because they do not place their affections in themselves. Some are passionate about the sciences, others about the public good. They are as attached to the discoveries of others as if they themselves had made them, or to the institutions of public welfare and the state as if they derived benefit from them. This habit of not thinking of themselves influences the whole course of their lives. They don't know how to use other men for their profit. Fortune offers them opportunities which they do not think of taking up.In nearly all men the self is almost never inactive. You will detect their self-interest in nearly all the advice they give you, in the services they do for you, in the contacts they make, in the friendships they form. They are deeply attached to the things which affect their interests however remotely, and are indifferent to all others. When they encounter a man who is indifferent to personal interest they cannot understand him. They suspect him of hidden motives, of affectation, or of insanity. They cast him from their bosom, revile him.
— Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
Humor relieves the tension between what we see or desire but repress in order to sustain a survivable illusion about the world we live in. As such it's always potent stuff, and dangerous.
— Lynda Williams
It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
— W.B. Yeats
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
I like a look of agony, because I know it's true
— Emily Dickinson
...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.
— Dianna Hardy, Cry Of The Wolf
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, The Daughter of Time
It's our nature, isn't it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief taht simple solutions exist
— Steven Erikson
A snake must be treated as a snake, forgiving it every time it showed you its fangs, will not transform into a garland of flowers.
— Himmilicious
Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience
— Isaac Asimov, The Tyrannosaurus Prescription and 100 Other Essays
The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age — unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.
— Josef Pieper
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, Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue
Men are not angels,” Akhmar affirmed. “And so men have the chance to be noble, in a way that angels cannot.
— J. Leigh Bralick, Down a Lost Road
He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
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
It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines
— Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days
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, Overkill
Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance.
— Orson Scott Card, Ruins
It wasn’t human nature to leave things alone. It was normal for people to try to fix things that didn’t need to be fixed; or, infinitely worse, trying to fix things that were broken, because some things are meant to be broken--
— Tom Upton, Just Plain Weird
what we are we potray that in our deeds.....
— Sai Kumar Nayak
Of course he despised the world as a whole
—  every thoughtful man should
Free will isn’t always about choice
—  often weakness plays the game
People started down the road with good intentions, but the moment the road became rough or difficult, they'd abandon it.
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dream Chaser
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, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
The way I see it, the impossible happens all the time; but we're so good at taking it for granted, we forget it was once impossible.
— Neal Shusterman, Bruiser
Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.
— Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul
What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
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, Steppenwolf
It is human nature to try hardest to accomplish the very thing we are told is impossible.  Why?  Because innately we know that nothing's impossible.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
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, Life of Pi
Distance reflects the true intensity of the relationship.. Some people come too close & Some forgets that u exist too..
— Vineet Upadhyay
You don't invent circumstances, but when they happen they reveal human nature.
— Louis Khan
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
Ego is the world's worst narcotic
— Mekael Shane
To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.
— Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!""Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either"."Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right".
— Lionel Shriver, A Perfectly Good Family
Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.
— Leslie McFarlane, Ghost of the Hardy Boys
Human beings feel an obligation to have a definate opinion on issues they can never truly know. They need to learn to be satisfied with "I don't know".
— Nathanie Randall
History is a record of human nature in action.
— James Carlos Blake
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
Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.
— Charles Bukowski
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, The Wisdom of Life
Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
The human soul is an abyss
— Fernando Pessoa
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, In the Midst of Death
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, Faust: First Part
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, Amped
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, Dancing After Hours
People grow, but they don't change.
— Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes
Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pullback the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatnessof this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewnacross the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist—mysoul purpose.
— Brian Bowers, Shadows Chasing Light
They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.
— Brian Herbert, House Harkonnen
To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.
— Richard Russo, The Risk Pool
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility.
— Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.
— Christopher Marlowe
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet
— George Orwell
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, Seize the Day
In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.
— Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.
— Richard Kadrey, Devil Said Bang
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
— William Golding
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, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
I have discovered that the world over, unusual weather prevails at all times of the year.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
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, Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction
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, Second Helpings
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, My Country And My People
[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.
— Joseph Epstein
We've all got our own brand of crazy.
— Meg Mitchell Moore
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
Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.
— Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
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
Pride,’ observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves.
— Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead
Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature--as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.
— Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
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
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, Good Neighbors
Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is. -- Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012)
— Nigel Hey
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
You can spend your life judging people or, you can spend it making friends. Take your pick.
— Carroll Bryant
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, Phantoms
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Pity those who don't feel anything at all.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.
— Tim Burton, Burton on Burton
Im a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me... And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without much more effort on his part, it would split wide open and my enormous river of emotions would gush out - the bad and the good. It was pretty much the scariest thing I'd ever thought of." - Maximum Ride.
— James Patterson, Angel
We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Evelyn: There's nothing wrong with embracing one's emotions.Brittany: Mom, You don't just embrace your emotions, you make love to them hard-core.
— Gena Showalter, Catch a Mate
Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated.
— Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Some things are too big to be seen
—  some emotions are too huge to be felt.
I read once that water is a symbol for emotions. And for a while now I've thought maybe my mother drowned in both.
— Jessi Kirby, Moonglass
Right now we're both yard sales of emotions. A penny for pain. A dime for bitterness. A quarter for grief. A dollar for silence. It binds us together, but I don't want him to pay the price for the parts of me that are used and broken.
— Courtney C. Stevens, Faking Normal
That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
— Nick Hornby, How to Be Good
You've got to hide your love away. You can't just hide your feelings. You have to destroy them. Kill them before they kill you.
— Elizabeth Eulberg, The Lonely Hearts Club
What she really craved was a connection. That feeling you got when you knew you were supposed to be with someone.
— J. Sterling, In Dreams
Watch a movie that makes you laugh or listen to a song that makes you cry. Embrace your emotions and be proud of what you feel.
— Demi Lovato, Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year
I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.
— Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
If you keep your emotions locked in a box, then when you want to open it one day you'll find that they're gone.
— M.D. Arnold
I'm not going to be hardened by these people, to these things, I'm not going to let them destroy my feelings or my emotions.
— Pete Doherty
In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.
— Baruch Spinoza
Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?
— Voltaire
I'd never heard of them, but at that moment, it was the best song I'd ever heard. I went out and bought Ten and listened to it on repeat. When I listened to track five, "Black," it was like I was there, in that moment all over again.After the summer was over, when I got back home, I went to the music store and bought the sheet music and learned to play it on the piano. I thought one day I could accompany Conrad and we could be, like, a band.
— Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty
All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.
— Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America By Day: Lessons Learned From Ultimate Betrayals And Unconditional Love
Everything passes. Joy. Pain. The moment of triumph
—  the sigh of despair. Nothing lasts forever - not even this.
Intensity of connection,Depth of emotion,Unified thoughts,No doubts in the significance of you.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Good manners have much to do with the emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them.
— Amy Vanderbilt
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.
— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
...men aren't in touch with their emotions, and don't share enough [?]
— Meg Cabot, Princess in Love
Emotions are messy.
— Ottilie Weber, Family Ties