Quotes for: Human nature

Quotes for: Human nature

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions.
Baruch Spinoza - Tractatus politicus

I am human, and I think that nothing of that which is human is alien to me.
Publius Terentius Afer - Heautontimoroumenos

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
Bertrand Russell

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Michel de Montaigne - Essays

The dignity of mankind is in your hands; protect it!
It sinks with you! With you it will ascend.
Friedrich Schiller - The Artists

Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.
Jeremy Bentham - Principles of Penal Law

Be humanity evermore our goal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
Jeremy Bentham - Principles of Morals and Legislation

I have only one passion, that for light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and which has the right to happiness.
Émile Zola - J'accuse… !

Architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.
Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.

Background photo by Mathieu Perrier on Unsplash

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein

Human nature

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
Alan Watts

Let's not be English, French or German any more. Let's be European. No, not European, let's be men. Let's be humanity. All we have to do is get rid of one last piece of egocentricity - patriotism.
Victor Hugo

Perhaps men entertain as many truths as falsehoods; have as many good qualities as bad; feel as many pleasures as pains. But we like to malign human nature, in order to try to raise ourselves above the common level, and to acquire for ourselves the respect of which we strive to rob it. We are so presumptuous, that we imagine we can separate our own personal interests from those of humanity in general, and malign the human race without implicating ourselves. This absurd vanity has filled books of philosophy with diatribes against human nature. Man is in disgrace with all thinkers, who rival one another in accusing him of depravity. But perhaps he may be about to rise again and recover all his virtues; nothing is permanent, and philosophy, like clothes, music, architecture, &c, has its vogues.
Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues - Reflexions and Maxims

I do not withdraw the wise man from the category of man, nor do I deny to him the sense of pain as though he were a rock that has no feelings at all.
Seneca - Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Humanity prefers to life reasons to live.
Simone de Beauvoir

We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt.
Bertrand Russell

A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
Nelson Mandela

Amiable weaknesses of human nature.
Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

What history relates is only the long, heavy, confused dream of humanity.
Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Virginia Woolf

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
Plato

A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Human nature

The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.
Alfred Adler

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.
Noam Chomsky

Human nature

The main scourge of humanity is not ignorance, because the ignorant often have excuses, but the refusal to know.
Simone de Beauvoir