Wordgrove Post & Review

THIS EDITION, revised:   human nature

Quoted In The Grove:
Man was nature’s mistake — she neglected to finish him — and she has never ceased paying for her mistake. For it was in the process of finishing himself that man got out from underneath nature’s inexorable laws, and became her most formidable adversary.
~Eric Hoffer

We humans are the greatest of the earth’s parasites.
~Martin H Fischer

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
~Stephen Hawking

EndQuote:
Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing.
~Antonio Porchia

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Exercise Prompt for 04/12:   door

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If man were relieved of all superstition, and all prejudice, and had replaced these with a keen sensitivity to his real environment, and moreover had achieved a level of communication so simplified that one syllable could express his every thought, then he would have achieved the level of intelligence already achieved by his dog.
~Robert Brault

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
~Leonardo da Vinci

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Man is the only trained animal who expects his reward before he does his trick.
~Robert Brault

Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human.
~Terri Guillemets

We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
~Barbara Kingsolver

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Ultimately, aren’t we all just talking monkeys with an attitude problem?
~Uncle Ben

We are monkeys with money and guns.
~Tom Waits

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled…
~Henry David Thoreau

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We may be the intelligent species, but we are certainly not the smartest!
~Kyle Short

Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.
~Bryant H McGill

It may be that all games are silly. But, then, so are human beings. This does not happen to be the planet into which the wiser spirits choose to be born.
~Robert Lynd

The higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his behind.
~African-American proverb

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Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

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Posted From The Grove

The basic rule of human nature is that the powerful people speak slowly and the subservient people quickly – because if they don’t speak fast nobody will listen to them
~Michael Caine

Law is born from despair of human nature.
~Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
~Henry Adams

I think it’s a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you’ll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.
~Cass Sunstein

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.
~Eric Hoffer

Humans have forgotten so much… It’s so easy for us to live now that our lives have no meaning. So we start looking for something else, something more. Money. A bigger house. A hobby. Church.
~Abby Geni

Humanity is a superhuman enterprise!… The purpose of which is to distinguish the race of man from the hodge-podge of the infinite, by means of the invincible forces of government and science.
~Jean Giraudoux

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There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.
~Alexander Hamilton

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
~Edward Gibbon

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.
~Hermann Hesse

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.
~Rutherford B Hayes

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What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
~Henry David Thoreau

Satan becomes a supreme monarch of the mind when seated on the throne of human ambition.
~James Lendall Basford

By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man — man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.
~Robert A Heinlein

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I was surrounded by nature and trying to come to terms with this blissful nature versus the inhumane mentality of war. People were being deluded by someone using the word peace.
~Thurston Moore

The point of departure of the process to which we wish to contribute is the fact that war is the natural reaction of human nature in the savage state, while peace is the result of acquired characteristics.
~Elihu Root

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.
~Xun Kuang

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.
~John Keats

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Poor Clarence, he is like the rest of the world, — whose goodness lies chiefly in the occasional throbs of a better nature, which soon subside, and leave them upon the old level of desire.
~Ik Marvel

There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
~Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power
~Alexander Hamilton

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
~Jacob Bronowski

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As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all — the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.
~J K Rowling

No one likes to have less than they had before. That’s the nature of the human animal.
~Joni Mitchell

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.
~David Millar

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.
~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Italians know about human nature — they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.
~Donna Leon

Everything we know about human nature and about government tells us that individuals using their own money will achieve far more good for themselves and far more for others than politicians spending money they didn’t have to work to earn.
~Harry Browne

In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
~Alexander Hamilton

Man’s greed for power and for money
Has strangled, within his own soul,
The richness and beauty of Truth
That would help him to reach his goal!
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
~Franklin D Roosevelt

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Motion Sickness:  Human Nature: Fear   (2:02)   …until you immerse

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~Filmsupply:  I Can Do That   (1:35)   proof from those believing they could

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~Alan Maxwell:  Human Body   (0:30)   watch as human faces mature and age…years

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~Vincent Urban:  In Russia   (6:37)   Reprised: until the madness ends, forget the politicians; real people live in real beauty here

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I have not read Nietzsche or Isben, nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have not desired to do it; I have gone to the fountain-head for information — that is to say, to the human race. Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking.
~Mark Twain

Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him.
~Antonio Porchia

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Human nature is above all things lazy.
~Harriet Beecher Stowe

It is in human nature to relax, when not compelled by personal advantage or disadvantage.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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The more one analyzes people, the more all reasons for analysis disappears. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
~Oscar Wilde

I’m an advocate of human nature.
~Jaron Lanier

The world and the human condition are not essentially benign.
~F Ivan Morris

There is no problem of human nature which is insoluble.
~Ralph J Bunche

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
~Joseph Baretti

There is so much of good in human nature that men grow to like each other upon better acquaintance, and this points to another way in which we may strive to promote the peace of the world.
~Elihu Root

It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.
~Tacitus

I haven’t lost faith in human nature and I haven’t decided to be less compassionate to strangers.
~Armistead Maupin

What is man but a species of vermin crawling upon the bare skin of Mother Nature?
~James Lendall Basford

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
~Henry Ward Beecher

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Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
~Orson Welles

The words human nature can be the greatest obstacle to human growth.
~Eugene J Martin

Human nature is not of itself vicious.
~Thomas Paine

Human nature is human nature, but it’s a good system and a very reliable system.
~James Johnson

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§ VIDEO:

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system — with all these exalted powers — Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
~Charles Darwin

Those who reject biological evolution do so, usually, not out of reason, but out of unjustified vanity.
~Isaac Asimov

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.
~David Hume

Evolution is individual — devolution is collective.
~Martin H Fischer

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To insult someone we call him “bestial.” For deliberate cruelty and nature, “human” might be the greater insult.
~Isaac Asimov

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
~Georg C Lichtenberg

Human nature will only find itself when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.
~Mahatma Gandhi

Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
~Author unknown

The next evolutionary step for humankind is to move from human to kind.
~Author unknown

Often what we take for a kindness is just someone acting in their capacity as a human being.
~Robert Brault

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We are told that we have ascended from the ape; but some of us are using round-trip tickets.
~Poor Richard Junior’s Philosophy

Evolution has stepped from the balloon into the parachute.
~Austin O’Malley

Evolution: that last step was a doozy!
~Terri Guillemets

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It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice, really; it’s an imperative.
~Michael Collins

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.
~Albert Einstein

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.
~Neil Armstrong

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We build cities on quaking ground, or in the path of the tide or the cyclone; we cause floods by squandering forests; we bring on wars; we let in plagues; then we write editorials about the visitations of providence.
~Austin O’Malley

Vain man sits in judgment on Nature’s wisdom, and thinks to determine its merits or assumes to point out its demerits — as much as if he were omniscient.
~James Lendall Basford

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.
~Camille Paglia

With the world’s human population now at seven billion and growing, and the demand for technology and modern conveniences increasing, we can’t control all our negative impacts. But we have to find better ways to live within the limits nature and its cycles impose.
~David Suzuki

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
~Arthur C Clarke

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
~Adlai E Stevenson

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.
~James Buchan

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The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.
~Harriet Ann Jacobs

There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge.
~Glenn T Seaborg

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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~Omeleto:  Krista   (9:32)   actor holding a mirror up to…

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~Omeleto:  How Can I Forget   (8:27)   mirrored talents

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~Amir Mehran:  Silent City   (6:57)   dark imaginings of war, animated

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~Stratostorm:  UMBRELLA   (7:55)   a gentle telling, animated

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I think violence, cynicism, brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling, going back to people sitting around fires, the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of that tradition.
~Eric Stoltz

People want to hear about the extremes of human nature. They want things that are larger than their own lives, and more romantic, and not necessarily of their own experiences.
~Richard Thompson

I’m interested in the psychological exploration of human nature, and it just happens to come in the form of film-making.
~Guy Pearce

Listen, if there’s one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature.
~Francis Ford Coppola

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Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything — except his own nature.
~Henry Miller

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.
~Charles Dickens

Could we perfect human nature, we might also expect a perfect state of things.
~Goethe

When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved, man’s remains will be in rigor mortis.
~Martin H Fischer

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Human nature refers to what is in people but which they cannot study or work at achieving.
~Xun Zi

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.
~Abraham Lincoln

Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.
~Evgeny Morozov

Human Nature is not a problem that can be fixed by rules and regulations. All solutions to the existing problems must be based on how people behave, not on how we think they should behave.
~Kirk Chisholm

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

Human nature is water, not stone.
~Marty Rubin

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§ MUSIC:

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
~William Wordsworth

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.
~Vera Nazarian

Doing things like playing music, something that’s so natural and basic to human function, running around in nature, eating delicious food. These things are intrinsic in basic, primordial to human beings, so that’s sort of a way to return to a blank canvas, allowing my true personality to return.
~Ezra Miller

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
~John Stuart Mill

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
~Steven Pinker

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
~Luigi Pirandello

Art is about expressing the true nature of the human spirit in whatever way one wishes to express it. If it is honest, it is beautiful. If it is not honest, it is obvious.
~Corin Nemec

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn’t destroy other cultures with the force of our own.
~Arthur Erickson

The structure of life I have described in buildings — the structure which I believe to be objective — is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.
~Christopher Alexander

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I mean, you always want everybody to pat you on the back and tell you you’re wonderful every time you do something; I think that’s human nature.
~David Duchovny

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
~William James

The doctors tell us of a physical disease called fatty degeneration of the heart… there is a moral malady — fatty degeneration of the soul; sooner or later it attacks every man, however noble his career, who puts self forward in his aims; who values fame because a personal possession.
~Frank Lee Benedict

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There’s something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting.
~Greg Kinnear

In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease — a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.
~Charles Dickens

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in
that procession but carrying a banner.
~Mark Twain

It’s human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn’t banging loudly on the door.
~David Hackworth

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
~Virginia Woolf

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~Damien Blue:  Christopher Gilbert // Human Nature   (2:30)   supple dance to Michael Jackson

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~Gauntlet Hair:  Human Nature   (3:48)   excusing human nature

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~Jonas Janzegers:  Time Is Human Nature   (4:00)   moody

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~The Human Nature:  Seven   (4:30)   visionary

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~Emily Kai Bock:  Arcade Fire — The Lightnignt I, II   (6:20)   first: don’t quit on me, then: mayhem

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~Madonna:  Human Nature   (4:33)   in latex

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When in the dim beginning of the years,
God mixed in man the raptures and the tears
And scattered thru his brain the starry stuff,
He said, Behold! Yet this is not enough…
~Edwin Markham

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!
~Alexander Herzen

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I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.
~James Taylor

The propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals is a basic component of human nature
~John Bowlby

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
~Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.
~Bertrand Russell

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
~A S Byatt

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When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
~Nicolas Chamfort

Human nature is such that monogamy is a really hard thing to achieve.
~Sienna Miller

Infinitely will I trust nature’s instincts and promptings, but I will not call my own perversions nature.
~Muriel Strode

Human nature can find no better helper than love.
~Diotima’s Speech

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Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
~Jane Austen

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.
~Mahatma Gandhi

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Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!
~Oliver Goldsmith

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
~Samuel Johnson

There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human — in not having to be just happy or just sad — in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.
~C JoyBell C

It is true, Reason is not sufficient to bring us to a perfect Knowledge of all Things, but it is able to furnish us with enough to make us happy, and that is as much as we need care for.
~Thomas Burnet

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Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?
~Daisaku Ikeda

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.
~Rollo May

And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of
~Adam Weishaupt

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IDLE Useless.
IDOLIZE To make useless.
~Charles Wayland Towne

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
~Mark Twain

The idea of human equality — a hopeful gloss of lipstick on the snout of truth.
~Dr Idel Dreimer

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
~E M Forster

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
~William James

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Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.
~Mark Twain

On the Sixth Day, God created man, the sort of result you often get when you go in to work on a Saturday.
~Robert Brault

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Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
~Albert Einstein

First God created time; then God created man that man might, in the course of time, perfect himself; then God decided that He’d better create eternity.
~Robert Brault

Man waz kreated a little lower than the angells — and haz bin gitting a little lower ever sinse.
~Josh Billings

Men are created like upright angels, but too often behave like downright devils.
~James Lendall Basford

Perchance God will pity a race that sought the better angels of its nature and found only its lesser demons.
~Robert Brault

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Grant fretted and irritated him…. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages…. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called — and should actually and truly be — the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous…. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.
~Henry Adams

Those who are horrified at Mr. Darwin’s theory, may comfort themselves with the assurance that, if we are descended from the ape, we have not descended so far as to preclude all hope of return.
~Ambrose Bierce

Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.
~Author unknown

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

I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.
~J P Donleavy

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© David Lorenz Winston

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Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes?
~Robert Brault

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For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being.
~Christopher Morley

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Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
~Honore De Balzac

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Every man is a millionaire in some part of his nature, and a pauper in others.
~James Lendall Basford

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Human nature is just about the only nature some people experience.
~Terri Guillemets

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We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.
~Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

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You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around — and why his parents will always wave back.
~William D Tammeus

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It was a lovely night, one of those nights, dear reader, which can only happen when you are young. The sky was so bright and starry that when you looked at it the first question that came into your mind was whether it was really possible that all sorts of bad-tempered and unstable people could live under such a glorious sky.
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Nature is not human hearted.
~Lao Tzu

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Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.
~Terence

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Human nature is not obliged to be consistent.
~Lucy Maud Montgomery

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The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself.
~Leon Trotsky

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Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.
~Noam Chomsky

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The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
~Erich Fromm

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I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.
~Samuel Johnson

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Truth is, I’ll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.
~Tom Hanks

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What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.
~Voltaire

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The more we study human nature, the less we think of men – the more of man.
~Theodore Tilton

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It’s human nature to always look at what your neighbor is doing.
~Richard Wilkinson

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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

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Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
~Arthur Schopenhauer

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Man likes to create and build roads, that is beyond dispute. But why does he also have such a passionate love for destruction and chaos? Now tell me that!
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Inconsistency with ourselves is the great weakness of human nature.
~Joseph Addison

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It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.
~Maria Montessori

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It is a law of human nature that in victory even the coward may boast of his prowess, while defeat injures the reputation even of the brave.
~Sallust

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It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

~ ~

@Writers Platform

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.
~Edward G Bulwer-Lytton

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.
~Ella R Bloor

However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.
~Henry Fielding

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
~Alfred North Whitehead

Nature loves to hide.
~Heraclitus

Nature is a Haunted House, but Art a House that tries to be haunted.
~Emily Dickinson

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he’d always identified with poets.
~Nicholas Sparks

~~

Prewritten Prompt:   human nature

~~

God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects.
~Mignon McLaughlin

Man, after all, may be but one of God’s discarded experiments.
~James Lendall Basford

Despise no man, since every one has his place in God’s design. A sheet of brown paper may be better as a wrapper for a loaf of bread than a page from Homer…
~Austin O’Malley

~

I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven.
~Augustus William Hare, Julius Charles Hare

God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man.
~Antonio Porchia

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
~Tony Campolo

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.
~Arnold J Toynbee

Within us there is a living spark of the divine man. Smother it as we may, it will some time set our souls on fire…
~Alwyn M Thurber

~

It is the fancy of every mortal that being cradled in the arms of mortality is a safe place for the time being…the Lord recognizing our need to be held.
~Robert Brault

DON JUAN: By Heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty… Shall man give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it? …
THE DEVIL: You think because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.
~Bernard Shaw

Fixed ideas of God and human nature are indispensable to the daily practice of men’s lives; but the practice of their lives prevents them from acquiring such ideas.
~Alexis de Tocqueville

All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis.
~Jacques Ellul

You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.
~William Lyon Phelps

~

You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
~Charles H Spurgeon

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
~Karl Kraus

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
~Denis Diderot

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.
~Abraham Harold Maslow

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
~Thomas Huxley

Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellow-creatures.
~Samuel Richardson

Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the eyes of the soul.
~Ovid

—

Envy is human nature.
~Monica Bellucci

It’s our nature: Human beings like success but they hate successful people.
~Carrot Top

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
~Mark Twain

There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
~Richard Le Gallienne

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.
~Joseph Addison

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
~Graham Greene

~

Out of the deep and endless universe
There came a greater Mystery, a Shape,
A Something sad, inscrutable, august—
One to confront the worlds and question them.
~Edwin Markham

Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature, and among them man is but one — perhaps the most miserable of all, because he is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question Why?
~Joseph Wood Krutch

We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound?
~Hendrik Willem van Loon

Life challenges each of us with an enigmatic and unyielding alchemy — making sense of the human experience.
~Dr Idel Dreimer

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
~Benjamin Haydon

~~

§ THE EXERCISE:

The Desk

Bless the desk that harbors secrets
a drawer that’s locked
where discovery waits

Diss the desk, drawers entire of secrets
locked to each other, human nature
find the key, discovery waits

~

Imagine #29

First came the Book of Life
then nature’s school of life
became the chip of life
the machine of memory
that recorded life
Imagine what aeons
of stored memories
the stars might teach

~

Question #29

We wander a world of tortured tree limbs
malleable clouds, flocks in flight
dangerous curves in the road
of stellar bodies and unrivaled souls
standards of beauty non-linear by nature

Yet the Creator features a creature
building babylon with straight lines
speaking a language of slants and angles
that values the shortest distance to goals
science probing as the cycles circle on

The blinding difference a source of wonder
Is it heaven both, or knowledge of another order

~

Out of Date

Fresh as dawn on its arrival
Dark meringe whipped cream atop it
Now withered dry inside the fridge

Desserts like love forfeit survival
I want a bit before you toss it
Tastes of nature unabridged

~

5s n 7s

fractious cats and dogs
the On and Off switch
love burned into hate
boiled water to ice
colors black thru white
shadings of rainbow
the nature of things

~

Listen to lectures
assume the posture
forsake your culture
‘S all about capture
do not surrender
summon your treasures
follow your nature

~

lovers’ one-lane two-way bridge
suspended in the wild wood
fated meeting of natures
charged atmosphere the forecast
impetuous as a storm

~

manly predator
mother nature in retreat
cash box for a foe
registers enemy: man
’till human nature repent

~

others deciding
finding pleasure in censure
cries human nature

~~

The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.
~William Howard Taft

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
~Henry David Thoreau

~

Human nature blames anyone except himself.
~Dale Carnegie

Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people’s excuses.
~Christian Friedrich Hebbel

~

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

It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.
~Frank B Kellogg

~

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
~Aristotle

Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.
~Edward Thorndike

~

It’s human nature to want to be with other people.
~Zoe Lister-Jones

Scenery is fine — but human nature is finer.
~John Keats

~

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.
~Dale Carnegie

Nature is now.
Humans are a tangled mess of past, present, and future.
~Terri Guillemets

~

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
~Walter Bagehot

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
~Walter Bagehot

~

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.
~Chuck Palahniuk

We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all. ~Antonio Porchia

~

All we hear is What’s the matter with the country? What’s the matter with the world? There ain’t but one thing wrong with every one of us in the world, and that’s selfishness.
~Will Rogers

A strong, brave man is born each month,
each year God gives a sage to men,
A poet each ten years, perhaps,
but an unselfish person,—when?
~Frederic Ridgely Torrence,

~

Man likes to create and build roads, that is beyond dispute. But why does he also have such a passionate love for destruction and chaos? Now tell me that!
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature, and among them man is but one — perhaps the most miserable of all, because he is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question Why?
~Joseph Wood Krutch

—

Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the [coral] polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.
~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Man is the connecting link between dust and Deity.
~James Lendall Basford

~

Child of Heaven! Born from the womb of a star!
~James Lendall Basford

Alas! it is hard to be human!
~George M P Baird

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live.
~Garth Stein

~ ~

The Olio
Quotes harvested from:  https://bqotd.com,  https://dailypnut.com,  https://www.quotegarden.com, https://wisesayings.com,  https://wordsmith.org

~

The Salmagundi
Video Harvest:  https://vimeo.com,  https://youtube.com

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