Quotes about Human nature

When emotional intelligence merges with spiritual intelligence, human nature is transformed.

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

That horrible Benito Hoover! And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

They had forgotten — as people inevitably forget

To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him. This sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush - these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth - bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.

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.