Quotes about Human nature

Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at. 

Perhaps the highest human potential is only realized when we no longer require the world to conform to our fantasies of how it should be.

Compassion is the answer to our question.  Power is not an answer, but the begging of the question.

Compassion vs. Power.
In life, beginning in infancy, we seek compassion.  Yet, we see power all around us, so we are curious.  We are offered compassion, but suspect that power is better.  So, when power is offered or available for taking, we often forget that compassion is the answer to our question.  Power is not an answer, but an endless question.

We humans, as a species, need to spend less time imagining
our metaphysical origins and more time pondering our unmistakably primate nature.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

The truth about human beings is, above all other forms of truth, something far too susceptible to our own willful and subjectivist distortions; by nature we never JUST LET SUCH A THING BE, or accept it as it is. Of all the decisive and strategic things that an intelligent human being needs to know about human beings, primary on the list would be this: human beings are overwhelmingly profoundly RESISTANT to knowing the truth about human nature. The one creature in all of organic nature that is capable of KNOWING its own nature is also, paradigmatic over all other creatures, the one most IN DENIAL about that nature. To ask of mortals that they should "know themselves" is little more than a cruel joke, japing at their crippled mentality and personality. Their grasp of this structural perversity or contrariety within human nature is the basis of all Greek wisdom, their aristic "misanthropy" or principled and profound distrust of human beings as pseudophiliacs. All that human beings are willing to call "truth" (for the most part) is some saccharine or cosmetic sweetness and light, some soporific opiate against all in human existence that might demand the utmost self-discipline, rationality, self-mastery, or spirituality from them.

So long as human nature remains viscerally resistant to enlightenment about its own slavish and self-stupefying necessities, there will ineluctably be suffering: truly, there is some suffering that is gratuitous (having no ground in our own karma or circles of obliquely willed actions upon ourselves), but in nature even the prey brings itself to the predator willingly but unwittingly. Even in the socially and economically and legally most utopian conditions, there will remain this irreducible self-obtuseness, self-evasiveness, self-irreality, in which men forever act as their own premier and unrecognized worst enemies, the obscure causes of their own self-suffering. And for the very same reasons that this suffering is uncomprehended for its true etiology, humans will also incurably continue to project blame onto others for their own self-injuries.

Human life is an extension of the principles of nature, and human civilization is a venture extrapolated out of human natures: man and his natural potential are the root of the entire human domain. The great task of all philosophizing is to become competent to interpret and steer the potential developmental forces in human natures and in the human condition, both of which are prodigiously fatalistic.

The three glues that hold humankind together are the courage of women, the compassion of men and the laughter of children.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.  Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry.  But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong the 'Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law--with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

You want to understand men, run a country paper.

It's a mystery to me;
We have a greed, with which we have agreed.
You think you have to want more than you need.
Until you have it all, you won't be free.

Anything you do, whether it is for immediate profit, future profit or "no" profit, is beneficial to YOU. It can also benefit someone else, but to YOU it will ALWAYS be beneficial.

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

Kindness is the highest form of intelligence.

What we actually learn from trying to carry out the program of philosophical education or teaching in the humanities or liberal arts (no matter how it may be done or via what materials), is demonstrably a lesson in diversification:  if there is anything "universalist" or "uniformitarian" about human nature, it defies being evidenced.  Students as individuals and as groups are very differentially susceptible to learning the arts of self-mastery and self-criticism:  if every human being were equitably competent to penetrate and discompose his own illusions and delusions, not just philosophy classes but education at large would be mostly superfluous.  People in general could just sit and think for themselves. 

I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul.  I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years.  If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three months' stay in England and Europe that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection you would have ten-fold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you.

Love is a force that connects us to every strand of the universe, an unconditional state that characterizes human nature, a form of knowledge that is always there for us if only we can open ourselves to it.

Listen: There's a hell of a good universe next door; lets go!

 Indeed, Whatever Happened to the Soul? is an attempt to establish a perspective on human nature that would allow for greater resonance between science and faith. We have tried to describe the nature of humans from the perspective of disciplines ranging from biology to theology in a way that is reconcilable and congruent. Our attempt has been, in every case, to achieve descriptions that both represent the current state of knowledge in the discipline and harmonize with the descriptions from the other disciplines. In order to increase by a few degrees the warming relationship between science and faith, we have attempted to sound a multi-disciplinary resonant chord (to mix metaphors).

Our core theme - the key of the resonant chord - is a monistic, or holistic, view of humans. In order to avoid confusion with reductionistic or materialistic forms of monism, which we do not wish to espouse, as well as to denote a particular form of monism, we have chosen the label "nonreductive physicalism" to represent our common perspective. Thus, statements about the physical nature of human beings made from the perspective of biology or neuroscience are about exactly the same entity as statements made about the spiritual nature of persons from the point of view of theology or religious traditions. We would disavow the opinion that human science speaks about a physical being, while theology and religion speak about a spiritual essence or soul.

To love my neighbor is to assist the arising and unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature.

The test of healthy religion, then, is its ability to assimilate the psychic antithesis of good and evil in the imago Dei and in human nature. Christianity's paradox is that the one who embodies the wholeness of God becomes the victim of humanity's dark side. In redeeming humanity, the unblemished goodness of Christ shows up humanity's dark side. But, according to Jung, since Christ is fully human and fully divine, Christians should acknowledge the polarities of good and evil in the Christ archetype. Instead, Christians have spiritualized Christ and excluded the instinctual, bodily aspects of Christ from the Christ image.

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.