Quotes about Human nature

There are two things men have never been able to satisfy: their curiosity and their greed.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.

There is indeed good and there is indeed evil, and both walk the earth. But good has little to do with the forms of religion, and evil has as little to do with so much behavior condemned by religion. Both good and evil vie for the passions of the heart. For love!

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

The fall of man is written in too legible characters not to be understood: Those that deny it, by their denying, prove it.

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

Left to himself, man is half beast and half devil.

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.

[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed.

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?