c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Why was it, she asked herself, that "animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?
— Diane Ackerman
Is human nature to believe that other places and other times are better than the here and now.
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.
— Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me
— Marquis de Sade
Everybody put on masks, including you and me. We all wear masks.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
By all means, become an abomination--but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
People do not change. It is just that they change the masks they wear and the acts they put on, with new costumes, new dialogues and new settings.That is human nature.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
and, indeed, nature has so made us, that we all love to be flattered and to please ourselves with our own notions
— Thomas More, Utopia
we’re all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can’t tell which is which
— Madeleine L'Engle
We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. The will that chooses poorly, then - through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire - has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression. And it is this richer understanding of human freedom that provides us some analogy to the freedom of God. For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary 'choice' - as among possibilities that somehow exceed his 'present' actuality - would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be 'capable' of evil - to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it - would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will is his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is FREE.
— David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
Where would the end be? Will the idea—the definition—of perfection stay the same? No. Perfection is too fickle. It’s in our nature to never be satisfied. We always think we can do more.
— J.D. Brewer, Vagabond
As in a tree, there is more sap in an Arm of the tree, than in a little sprig; but the sprig hath the same sap for kind that the Arm of the tree hath, and it all comes from the same root. So though there be more venom in some gross, crying sins, than in some others; yet there is no sin but hath the same sap, and the same venom, for the kind, that every sin hath, that the worst sin hath.
— Jeremiah Burroughs, The Evil of Evils: The Exceeding Sinfulness of Sin
There is only one sin, only one, and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right of a husband, you rob his children of a father. When you lie you steal someone's right to truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no more wretched act than stealing. A man who takes what is not his to take, be it life or a loaf of naan, I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
I am sure when Cinderella went to that ball, she took a great deal more pleasure in outsmarting her stepmother than in the carriage and the ball dress and the glass slippers.
— Gita V. Reddy, Cinderella's Escape
sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little. They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.
— Ian McEwan
I learned many things about human nature, but one of the greatest is the nobility inherent within us all, for one of the greatest things about being human is the ability to be humane
— Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out
What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery?
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man
And the ultimate question remains, To live, is it a blessing or the punishment itself ?
— Charlyn Khater
Its just human nature. People forget past and only care about their present and don't think what will happen in future...
— Taimoor Madni
Nobody sane loves working in an office, It’s against human nature to be locked up in a cubicle all day long.
— Peter Clines, 14
Curiosity is the essence of our existence.
— Gene Cernan
Holly girl, you are all too human, I can assure you. Prickly and awkward and human, because that's what witches are - human, that is, not necessarily the prickly and annoying bit. That's just you.
— J.S. Watts, Witchlight
Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted, men who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge, who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit, we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions.
— Christopher Buehlman, The Lesser Dead
Its easy to lie, but hard to confess
— Mohammad Azeem
Very little of what he learned of people’s actions began or ended with either the noble ideals or the fiendish wickedness he had been taught lay behind all great struggles. There was something comforting in this.
— David Anthony Durham, Acacia: The War with the Mein
I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It’s a clumsy try for the comfort of normality.
— Adib Khan, Spiral Road
If manifestations of her love are overwhelming and sometimes seem imprudent, it’s because the intensity of such caring doesn’t exist in other areas of life. Ma does not love from behind a protective shield. I’m incapable of opening up to people in the way she does. Ma isn’t afraid of being vulnerable and doesn’t measure relationships in terms of what she can gain. If her feelings are hurt, she doesn’t hide the pain or seek revenge. She stumbles over the setback as though it’s one of life’s quirky tests of fortitude and moves on without storing any resentment.
— Adib Khan, Spiral Road
A man wreaks harm because he forgets to love peace. He kills because of self-blinded fear, that imagines no other protection.
— Janny Wurts, Peril's Gate
Why are they like that?' I asked Cico. We skirted Blue Lake and worked our way through the tall, golden grass to the creek.'I don't know,' Cico answered, 'except that people, grown-ups and kids, seem to want to hurt each other - and it's worse when they're in a group.
— Rudolfo Anaya
Doesn't there, in fact, exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his own very best interests, or - not to violate logic - some best good ... which is more important and higher than any other good, and for the sake of which man is prepared if necessary to go against all the laws, against, that is, reason, honour, peace and quiet, prosperity - in short against all those fine and advantageous things - only to attain that primary, best good which is dearer to him than all else?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
At the end of the day, we're all striving to be touched, somehow.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
If people would take me seriously, I’d never find out anything significant about them.
— Aleksandra Ninkovic, Write like no one is reading
I’ve always thought that the best moments can come from the worst times.
— Carla H. Krueger
Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.
— Gustave Flaubert
One of the best things about humans is their ability to love.
— Auliq Ice
What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill.
— Rampo Edogawa
Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow.
— Dean Koontz, False Memory
The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with those who matter to you most.
— Auliq Ice
If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
Love is a sentiment precipitated by an illusionary excitement which seldom fades away leaving the victims in utter hope and distraction to love and be loved in return
— Moywaywa
Understanding the world is a door to believing what we are, where we are living in and what we expect to come out of our actions.
— Auliq Ice
I thought the invention of mobile phone was to save our time & money, be we are doing exactly the opposite.
— Srinivas Shenoy
Human being is the only creature I found ho does everything he is not suppose to do.
— Srinivas Shenoy
It's a funny things about human nature. Nobody ever wonders why they've got a healthy brother or a perfect kiddie. Anything goes wrong, though, we soon start why, oh why...
— Laurie Graham, The Future Homemakers of America
Some of the most likeable people on the outside are capable of truly heinous things.
— Kenneth Eade, HOA Wire
While most things require money to invest in, with efforts toward uncertain market shares maintained.Friendship is something your heart invests in, with priceless returns shared, in warm memory, remain.
— Tom Althouse, The Frowny Face Cow
Someone should do a study of the human brain and how quickly it can adjust to luxury.
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
Is It Frightening To Be Free?""You said it.""You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?""Seems to be a major human activity, yes.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Men like that — when they know they won’t be found out — they will do anything.
— Michelle Paver
One day people will come back. they won't be able to help themselves. People need music and dance and beautiful things. They forget sometimes, but not forever. You'll see. One day, this will be a magical place again. With music and dance and good times and people celebrating.
— Nadia Aguiar
It seemed to us that all people to a greater or lesser degree belong to one of these two types, that almost every one of us resembles either Don Quixote or Hamlet.
— Ivan Turgenev, Don Quixote
Throughout history there have been those who have created change, and others who have feared it.
— T.A. Uner
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. 'Faking it' in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail.
— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
...He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: "Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories: Volume 4
I was frightened of so many things, in my vanity, that ultimately i couldn't protect myself any other way. Try not to be like that, okay? Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered.Live like a flower. You have that right. It's something you can achieve, for sure, in your lifetime. And it's enough.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.
— John Howard Griffin
While the world wasn't build for the humans, we were built for the world
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Here were we wretched creatures of men making for each other's throats, and outraging the good earth which God had made so fair a habitation.
— John Buchan
We have to combine, certainly, but if we combine to fight on the idea of each man making more money for himself, then we end by fighting one another. And that's the trouble now... human dealings are founded - founded - not on money but on what is fair and just all round.
— Neil M. Gunn
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
— John Stuart Mill
Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.
— Alan Moore
402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.
— Alan Moore
... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Length of smile get reduced as people grow up!!!
— Akshay Dubey
... I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.
— W. Somerset Maugham
On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.
— Laura Hillenbrand
Just because we are capable of art didn't what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest as monstrous. The same hands committed both. Brains don't undermine the savagery. They made us better at it.
— Michael Marshall
Because of our selfishness and inclination toward personal comfort and convenience, we'd rather not have to deal with constant change and uncertainty. We have difficulty reconciling the goodness of God with the mystery of his ways.
— Chris Hodges, Fresh Air: Trading Stale Spiritual Obligation for a Life-Altering, Energizing, Experience-It-Everyday Relationship with God
Depend upon it you see but half. You see the evil, but you do not see the consolation. There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better; we find comfort somewhere- and those evil-minded observers, dearest Mary, who make much of a little, are more taken in and deceived than the parties themselves.
— Jane Austen
Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul.
— Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude.
— Julius Ceasar
Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.
— George Eliot, Silas Marner
Some things a girl has in her to say no to and some things cut her down before she knows she’s gone. Sure, some twiggy, thorny snap in her says: no, this is awry, this is a bent thing, in that place that tells her to belly up to the floor before anyone’s even shadowed the doorframe. But it don’t matter. You can’t ask why she did it, when she was warned, when she was told. The plum truth is you would too, if everything impossible stood out there saying you could be loved so perfect the past would go up like a firecracker and shatter across the dark.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
God is an idea, the devil is us.
— Joe R. Lansdale, The Thicket
You can't change laws without first changing human nature... You can't change human nature without first changing the law.
— Neal Shusterman, Unwind
Writing isn't about creating perfect characters. There's no such thing. It's about creating characters that are real; flawed-- yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn't make them weak; if they believed all they needed was them self, they would be. A strong heroine isn't afraid to admit that a best friend, or soul mate, is exactly what they need at one moment or another. A strong heroine never stands alone. They stand tall; they believe in who they are. They are perfect in every human flaw, because as humans we are flawed. And in every flaw, I see the perfection of their souls. Writers breath life into simple words and create beings--flaws and all.
— Cassandra Giovanni
First came him, then came I, then he came again and then I was lost forever.
— Alok Jagawat
He had drawn a derogatory statement from George. He felt safe now.
— John Steinbeck
Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.
— Theodore Dalrymple
When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice.
— T.K. Naliaka
When you hate someone it means you like it.
— Rida Noor
It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.
— William J. Bernstein
Humans have a propensity to oppose things when it is not their idea and they had no input, or simply because it was initiated by those whom they dislike.
— GE Paulus
Introverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
— Susan Cain
But you have to admit it is human nature to only really appreciate something if you’ve worked for it, or if you know you can lose it. How are you going to make the inhabitants of your little heaven feel fulfilled if everything comes to them easily?
— Josephine Angelini, Goddess
Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been.
— Aristotle, The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle
It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.
— John Jay, The Federalist Papers
...you'll see, he said, they'll go back to dividing everything up among the priests, the gringos and the rich, and nothing for the poor, naturally, because they've always been so fucked up that the day that shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole...
— Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch
Behaviours and feelings rarely line up.
— Richelle Mead, Last Sacrifice
When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the uncared block: life is fun.
— Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh
The most painful emotions are better than none at all. Ironically, we make you human.
— Kelsey Sutton, Where Silence Gathers
It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.
— John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.
— Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel
Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.
— Rémy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris,: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques
Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one's own in relation to those of the other.
— Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre
It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion.I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all.The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
The problem is that we are humans.
— Yara Hikal
The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality...[I]f we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils. The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life...come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children...or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the final solution because they thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist...
Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.
— Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found.
— Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook
You really are a chameleon, aren't you? Fitting in wherever you go."Aren't we all?" she said...
— Suzanne Palmieri, The Witch of Belladonna Bay
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretence invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Men are by nature wanderers...Every people has moved from somewhere, and had to learn the ways of the land from the people who were there before.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House
...a man's blood soon runs cold where there is no one around to warm it up.
— Anonymous, Go Ask Alice
It's not often you encounter the real person behind a good-natured mask, the darkest parts of someone. It's not comfortable when you do.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is in essence, simply human nature. All the worlds nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another. The foundation of any national character is human nature. The foundation of national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallisation of it.
— Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook
I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I am generous to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my suppressed rage, that I am punctual only only to hide how little I care about other peoples time.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
john was smart, but he was also a young male with a usually empty belly. sometimes it was simple as that
— David Baldacci, The Finisher
-Would you wish us to invest it for you?-No, I would like you to set up a trust for dumb animals.-What kind of dumb animals do you have in mind, Miss Donahue?-Oh, stray dogs. Rats. Birds.-We could still invest it for you. Then the animals would get the income without touching the capital.-No, I don't wish to invest it. I don't want them to get rich. They might become human.
— Romain Gary, خداحافظ گاری کوپر
Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
I am more human than rational.
— Karen Essex, Stealing Athena
the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.
— Aldous Huxley, Island
I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
...it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle." p28
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Human beings tend to be unable to estimate how biased they are.
— Jean-François Manzoni
What white middle America loathes these days are poor and poorish people, especially the kind who look and sound like they just might live in a house trailer. They will swear on a stack of Lands' End catalogs that they are not bigots, but, human nature being what it is, we are all kicking someone else's dog around, whether we admit it or not.
— Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
We tell the dead to rest in peace, when we should worry about the living to live in peace.
— Anthony Liccione
We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.
— Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic
In the long run one gets used to anything.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
Human nature is always interesting... And it's curious to see how certain types always tend to act in exactly the same way." - Miss Marple, The Herb of Death, Pg. 167
— Agatha Christie, The Thirteen Problems
Isn't it strange how people are selective about the truth the want to see or hear?
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
A well-behaved person is not always well-dressed.
— Hussain Rasheed
They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters.
— Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart
...men are monsters all, and something in them wants to force others to see the world the same way they see it.
— M.J. Rose, The Collector of Dying Breaths
Haven't you got it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past & that philosophy is worse than Bertillon's guide to harassed cops? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral & animal, all disorder, & so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business & the arts, & all theories, passions & systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action subjected to every possible & imaginable contingency & contradiction. Life. Life is a crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?
— Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine
If I ever met someone without a single shadow on their heart, it was surely a child too young for speaking.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions.
— Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen
It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change.
— Cormac McCarthy
The wounded can inflict the most painful wound without hesitation.
— Bella Forrest, A Shade of Blood
They have achieved a level of organization far beyond others of their species. Unfortunately, it is being used for destructive purposes at the moment. Don't look so surprised my dear, it's in the nature of the beast.''But these squirrels are not beasts!' Amber protested. 'Oh pish-posh, we are all of us beasts,' the professor replied lightly. 'The trouble comes when we try to pretend that we're not.
— Janet Taylor Lisle, Forest
Who we were shapes us into who we are, and who we are shapes us into who we’ll become.
— Rachel Aukes, 100 Days in Deadland
... the love of money is the root of all evils." - John de Alençon, Pg, 64
— The Medieval Murderers, The Lost Prophecies
Humans are the smallest organs of the human body.
— Shinjini Bhattacharjee, Masquerading Fawn
Misery, after all, loves company.
— Bella Forrest, A Castle of Sand
But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.
— Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power
Most creatures run when they sense danger. People grab a six-pack and a folding chair.
— Nenia Campbell, Black Beast
Liz paced and talked like it was just another test. Another challenge. She was looking at it like an exercise in probability - cause and effect. It's the physics of human nature, and to truly understand it, one has to be objective and cool.
— Ally Carter, United We Spy
He wondered at the atrocities human kind was capable of committing. The majority of those housed below were ill, mentally or physically, not witches. Most were poor victims--the outcasts of society; or the opposite, people so blessed, others coveted their lives.
— Brynn Chapman, Where Bluebirds Fly
Part of the terrible irony of war is that it enlists the best in human nature for purposes of mutual destruction.
— Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture
Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite,That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy:Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:It shall be waited on with jealousy,Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end,Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud,Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while;The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'dWith sweets that shall the truest sight beguile:The strongest body shall it make most weak,Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak.'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild,Make the young old, the old become a child.'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear;It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;It shall be merciful and too severe,And most deceiving when it seems most just;Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward,Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.'It shall be cause of war and dire events,And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire;Subject and servile to all discontents,As dry combustious matter is to fire:Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy,They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.
— William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
I know human nature. We might sacrifice a few, because we are stupid and hardwired for group survival. But we would never die in the thousands because a god wished it. Those kinds of numbers require material gains, like power, wealth, territory.
— Ilona Andrews, Gunmetal Magic
Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We’re still in the cave. It’s just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die. . .
— Greg Iles, The Devil's Punchbowl
No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
Ginny Cupper took me in her car out to the spread fields of Indiana. Parking near the edge of woods and walking out into the sunny rows of corn, waving seeds to a yellow horizon. She wore a white blouse and a gray patch of sweat under her arms and the shadow of her nipples was gray. We were rich. So rich we could never die. Ginny laughed and laughed, white saliva on her teeth lighting up the deep red of her mouth, fed the finest food in the world. Ginny was afraid of nothing. She was young and old. Her brown arms and legs swinging in wild optimism, beautiful in all their parts. She danced on the long hood of her crimson Cadillac, and watching her, I thought that God must be female. She leaped into my arms and knocked me to the ground and screamed into my mouth.
— J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
I'm Noah, and you are the ship coasting along the banks and as long as you are my valentine I will sail between your eyes..
— Adel Abouhana
The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.
— Greg Iles, The Devil's Punchbowl
In other hand of the enemy will arise the fortune hero.
— Lena Hussain
Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories ofconstrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of humannature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this theRealistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained inall respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold aRealistic Vision of human nature.
— Michael Shermer, Brain, Belief, and Politics
Understand: I don't ever want to be equal to any other being. I always want to be greater...in all things, in all circumstances.
— Brandi L. Bates, Remains To Be Seen
She's not quite making sense, but no one does all the time.
— Jael McHenry
The reason why many people remain on the bottom is because they play to 'not lose', as opposed to playing to win at all costs.
— Brandi L. Bates, Remains To Be Seen
For all our failings. Despite our limitations fallibilities. We humans are capable of greatness.
— Carl Sagen
Those who cannot dance, should not dance.
— Cian Beirdd
No one is born with equality. We all come here with varying degrees of opportunities, qualities, strengths, weaknesses, IQ, etc.
— Brandi L. Bates, Remains To Be Seen
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.
— Grace Murray Hopper
Human beings wear clothing and walk upright, but when you take that away, we're nothing but monkeys.
— Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito
The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep was a sheep still for all its wearing it.
— Thomas More, Utopia
I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.
— Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal.
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual giants who extract the gold within me, those who force me to read, to attend classes, seminars, conferences, and who steep me in an environment of perpetual growth and upward mobility. Not trying to be funny, but I've learned that I simply cannot afford to invest too much time around mediocrity. It's contagious.
— Brandi L. Bates
Never try to change the nature of anyone in your life, you will loose respect and eventually the person.
— Ashar Siddiqui
You don't have to be ashamed feel down, to have a good cry; we are human after all and it's the part of humanity.
— Euginia Herlihy