On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

Human beings tend to be unable to estimate how biased they are.

God is an idea, the devil is us.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines

he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to...

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories ofconstrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of humannature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this theRealistic Vision....

a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling...

En natt i lengst forsvundne tider våknet mennesket og så seg selv… da dyrene kom til sine vannhull, hvor han ventet dem av gammel vane, da kjente han ikke lenger tigerspranget i sitt blod, men...

It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

Imagine about anything instead of assume about it.

You ever get the feeling the world’s filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when...

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses:...

Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That’s not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it’s got demon gods in it...

Man’s chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.

You are the only one who can.

A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar.

And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all...

I don’t know why people are afraid of lust. Then I can imagine that they are very afraid of me, for I have a great lust for everything. A lust for life, a lust for...

I’ve always thought that the best moments can come from the worst times.

Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written...

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

Vi har ett slags grundmentalitet som gör att vi i första hand ser de förändringar som gör oss osäkra. Och det som gör oss osäkra är skrämmande, och ger i sin tur alltid upphov till...

The human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are inconceivable to the mind and heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity.

Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, – men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free,...

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

Function? Why function? Who needs more functioning human beings? It’s really quite astounding, if you ask me, the sheer quantity of normal in the world today. I think that’s the real horror of modern life.

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.

If you don’t write when you don’t have time for it, you won’t write when you do have time for it.

Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim,...

Every day we all make little MISTAKES in life, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay for them for the rest of our lives.Sometimes GOOD people make BAD choices, but that doesn’t mean we...

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

If you are HUMAN, then the limit of what you can do, what you learn, what you can experience HAS NOT YET BEEN REACHED.

Nobody can turn you into a slave unless you allow them. Nobody can make you afraid of anything, unless you allow them. Nobody can tell you to do something wrong, unless you allow them. God...

Ten minutes ago, Frank though he was going to prison. Now he knows he’s not, and part of him thinks he should just be glad he’s getting out of this at all, but he’s not....

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

Who we were shapes us into who we are, and who we are shapes us into who we’ll become.

I live in an ocean of smell…

But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to...

I hope you haven’t given up on the S.Q.’s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves’ clothing. If not for S.Q.’s good nature, we’d never have escaped.

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

Length of smile get reduced as people grow up!!!