Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.
Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.
You know that a given in life in human nature, is that at a sporting event, a baseball game, a football game, you never introduce a politician, is because he'll be booed. I don't care if he's the most beloved person in the world, its part of the game.
If you develop a dialogue with me and take an interest in me, I'll want to give you the business. It's human nature.
Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
How many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.
I think we simply all like to project ourselves into somebody else - somebody who is better-looking, richer, smarter. It's comforting. It's escapism, and that, of course, is what the movies are supposed to be all about. Ultimately, I think it's just part of human nature to pretend.
Human nature is such that monogamy is a really hard thing to achieve.
Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.
To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature.
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
But human nature dictates that there will always be cheaters. That's inevitable. Where there's money involved and glory, there are going to be people that cheat, and there will always be ways to cheat.
People who have expertise just love to share it. That's human nature.
We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.
Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.
God who created us has granted us the faculty of speech that we might disclose the counsels of our hearts to one another and that, since we possess our human nature in common, each of us might share his thoughts with his neighbor, bringing them forth from the secret recesses of the heart as from a treasury.
No man can see God in this life and live because His glory would annihilate our poor, weak human nature.
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
Relying on the face might be human nature - even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
I think when you win the national championship, it works throughout your team. Where human nature is to say, I did well. I got my quota this month. Now do I get some time off? Do I get a bonus? Do I get to go on a cruise? But it's not to keep trying to be the best. That's not necessarily human nature.
To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.
You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.
No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.
Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.
I think we present extreme aspects of human behavior and hopefully get at times, messages across or bring issues to the table or as we so often say, shed light into the dark crevices of human nature.
In athletics there's always been a willingness to cheat if it looks like you're not cheating. I think that's just a quirk of human nature.
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.