Human Nature Quotes

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

To hurt is as human as to breathe.

"Yes, him - Snape said he hates me because he hated my father. Is that true?"
"Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike yourself and Mr Malfoy. And then, your father did something Snape could never forgive."
"What?"
"He saved his life."
"What?"
"Yes ..." said Dumbledore dreamily. "Funny, the way people's minds work, isn't it?"

Humans do have a knack for choosing precisely those things which are worst for them.

Away with the cant of ‘Measures not men’!—the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. If the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness.

The absolute worst thing anyone could say about you is that you were a selfish, moral blank, whose lazy cynicism and sneering, ironic take on the world encapsulates everything wrong with a generation. But you my friend are not evil.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.

All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are