The nature of man Quotes

“The only problem with her is that she is too perfect. She is bad in a way that entices, and good in a way that comforts. She is mischief but then she is the warmth of home. The dreams of the wild and dangerous but the memories of childhood and gladness. She is perfection. And when given something perfect, it is the nature of man to dedicate his mind to finding something wrong with it and then when he is able to find something wrong with it, he rejoices in his find, and sees only the flaw, becoming blind to everything else! And this is why man is never given anything that is perfect, because when given the imperfect and the ugly, man will dedicate his mind to finding what is good with the imperfect and upon finding one thing good with the extremely flawed, he will only see the one thing good, and no longer see everything that is ugly. And so....man complains to God for having less than what he wants... but this is the only thing that man can handle. Man cannot handle what is perfect. It is the nature of the mortal to rejoice over the one thing that he can proudly say that he found on his own, with no help from another, whether it be a shadow in a perfect diamond, or a faint beautiful reflection in an extremely dull mirror.”

“The cause of all trouble, the root of all sorrow, the dread of every man lies in this one small word—sin. It has crippled the nature of man . . .It has caused man to be caught in the devil’s trap.”

“God abides in men""God abides in men,These are men who are simple,they are fields of corn...Such men have mindslike wide grey skies,they have the grandeurthat the fools call emptiness.God abides in men.Some men are not simple,they live in citiesamong the teeming buildings,wrestling with forcesas strong as the sun and the rain.Often they must forgo dream upon dream...Christ walks in the wildernessin such lives.God abides in men,because Christ has put onthe nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.He has put on everyone's life...to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...Christ has put on Man's nature,and given him back his humanness...God abides in man.”

“I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.”

“A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.”

“You must understand that it is not in the nature of Man to be grateful. So in whatever you or I do for others we must never expect gratitude. If we do, we will only be disappointed.”

“Man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor.”

“But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him. A man with malaria parasites in his blood is a danger to his companions. To kill all the parasites, he was then required to continue doses of quinine a week or ten days after his fever. When the convalescing men were given their daily dose of quinine they would manage to throw their tablets out of the dispensary window. The old turkey-gobbler pet of the hospital gobbled up all the tablets he could find. He became so dissipated he finally developed a species of blindness caused by too much quinine. I cannot vouch for this, but I was often twitted with this story as an illustration of how the men were treating prophylactic quinine.”

“It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.”

“It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.”