Quotes about Human nature

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

So long as a society remains economically stratified, the challenge of reconciling lifelong monogamy with human nature will be large. Incentives and disincentives (moral and/or legal) may be necessary.

If people are basically selfish -and they are- then asking them to work hard yet earn no more than their unproductive neighbor is asking more than they'll rarely give. But we already know that; communism has failed.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

Christianity will not be content to be an evolution within the total category of human nature; an engagement such as that is too little to offer to a god. Neither does it even want to be the paradox for the believer, and then surreptitiously, little by little, provide him with understanding, because the martyrdom of faith (to crucify one's understanding) is not a martyrdom of the moment, but the martyrdom of continuance.

I am by nature so polemically constituted that I only feel myself really in my element when I am surrounded by human mediocrity and paltriness.

To sin is human, to lay snares is diabolical.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

Indeed, to sacrifice seems as natural to man as to pray; the one indicates what he feels about himself, the other what he feels about God. The one means a felt need of propitiation, the other a felt sense of dependence.

He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one.

If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we'd be angels, and angels can't love the way men and women do.

She was beginning to think that human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared used up, dusty and dry.