HUMAN NATURE

How can I be expected to believe that this same racial discrimination which has been the cause of so much injustice and suffering right through the years, should now operate here to give me a fair and open trial?....consider myself neither morally nor legally obliged to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I am not represented. That the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government, is a principle universally acknowledged as sacred throughout the civilized world.
Nelson Mandela

One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

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

My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
William Shakespeare

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

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
R. Buckminster Fuller

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!
Emma Goldman

I am at two with nature.
Woody Allen

There is a great deal of human nature in people.
Mark Twain

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

It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
Anatole France

Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.
Lorraine Anderson

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag

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

Men are equally similar in nature, few become different when they endure and triumph over the profundity of temptation.
Maynard June Panganiban

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
John F. Kennedy

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.
George Bernard Shaw

The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.
Kingsley Amis

The ''control of nature'' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.
Rachel Carson

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God;
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside.
Source Unknown

It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it.
Source Unknown

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

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.
Socrates

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
Henry Ward Beecher

I know up on the top you are seeing great sights, but down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.
Dr. Seuss

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
Kalan

Words like ''freedom,'' ''justice,'' ''democracy'' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James Baldwin

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The human spirit is so great a thing that no man can express it; could we rightly comprehend the mind of man nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth.
Philipus A. Paracelsus

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.
Source Unknown

The great universal family of men is a utopia worthy of the most mediocre logic.
Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

The human spirit is your specifically human dimension and contains abilities other creatures do not have. Every human is spiritual; in fact, spirit is the essence of being human. You have a body that may become ill; you have a psyche that may become disturbed. But the spirit is what you are. It is your healthy core.
Joseph Fabry

Nature is not human hearted.
Lao-Tzu

Our actions throughout the day seek to imitate nature by having a purpose. Kindness is like the rising of the sun that sheds new light on matters and compassion is like the rain that washes a way the old and nurtures new life.
Michael Heninger

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.
Oscar Wilde

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.
Marquis De Vauvenargues

I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.
Herman Melville

The sun will set without thy assistance.
The Talmud

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.
Joseph Wood Krutch

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - will it return to my body when they scatter?
Kotomichi

Art is man's nature: Nature is God's art.
Philip James Bailey

Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.
Henry Van Dyke

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
Peter De Vries

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.
Pearl S. Buck

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.
Eric Hoffer

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words ever uttered, Let there be light, constitute its charter. All nature is vibrant with its impulse.
Bruce Barton

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
Anne Frank

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!
Logan Pearsall Smith