An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON HUMAN NATURE
We are all manufacturers. Making good, making trouble, or making excuses.
H. V. Adolt
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
Warren Buffett (1930-, American investment entrepreneur)
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
Noam Chomsky (1928-, American linguist, political activist)
By starving emotions, we become humorless, rigid and stereotyped. By repressing them, we become literal, reformatory and holier-than-thou. Encouraged, they perfume life; discouraged, they poison it.
Joseph Collins
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784, French philosopher)
Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
In a tavern everybody puts on airs except the landlord.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -- it's human.
Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536, Dutch humanist)
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -- it's human.
Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536, Dutch humanist)
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
Anatole France (1844-1924, French writer)
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!
Emma Goldman (1869-1940, American anarchist)
We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830, British essayist)
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962, German-born Swiss novelist, poet)
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify -- so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
John Keats (1795-1821, British poet)
Even when a man acts ungrateful, it is often his benefactor who is more deserving of being labeled as disgraceful.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680, French classical writer)
We are all murderers and prostitutes -- no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
R. D. Laing (1927-1989, British psychiatrist)
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
Georg C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799, German physicist, satirist)
The tendency of human nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards. All people have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downwards. Now, by striking water and causing it to leap up, you may make it go over your forehead, and, by damming and leading it, you may force it up a hill; -- but are such movements according to the nature of water? It is just the force applied that causes them. When people are made to do what is not good, their nature is being dealt with in this same way.
Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse) (c.370-300 BC, Chinese philosopher)
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 (1806-1873, British philosopher, economist)
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.
Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)
I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762, British society figure, letter writer)
Man, as he is, is not a genuine article. He is an imitation of something, and a very bad imitation.
Peter Demianovich Ouspensky (1878-1947, Russian philosopher)
Human nature is not of itself vicious.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809, Anglo-American political theorist, writer)
Human nature is the same all the world over.
American Proverb (Sayings of American origin)
My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616, British poet, playwright, actor)
Could we know what men are most apt to remember, we might know what they are most apt to do.
George Savile
There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
There is a great deal of human nature in people.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
Author Unknown
It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it.
Author Unknown
It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside.
Author Unknown
Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the truth, bending over backward, lying down on the job, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck.
Author Unknown
The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.
Giambattista Vico (1688-1744, Italian philosopher, historian)
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941, British novelist, essayist)
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