Frans de Waal Quotes

Nobody acts purely selfishly.

Humans are not really very humane.

I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes.

You can tell by the kindness of a dog how a human should be.

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

We must challenge a culture that is based on too much meanness and not enough meaning.

The act of feeling what you believe other people feel is morally corosive.... If we want to be good and caring people, if we want to make the world a better place, then we are better off withouit empathy.

The whole history of the world has been the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.

Take away someone’s fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation.

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

There is a need for everyone's brain to be imprinted with more self-enhancing impulses: the impulse to peace over violence, love over fear, compassion over selfishness.

I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.

The sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also.

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.

It is my fundamental conviction that compassion - the natural capacity of the human heart to feel concern for and connection with another human being - constitutes a basic aspect of our nature shared by all human beings, as well as being the foundation of our happiness. All ethical teachings, whether religious or nonreligious, aim to nurture this innate and precious quality, to develop it and to perfect it.

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.

If you want a kinder world, then behave with kindness; if you want a peaceful world, make peace within.

We're all born with selfish desires, so we can all relate to those feelings in others. But kindness is something made individually by each person. So it's easy to misunderstand when others are trying to be kind to you.

At the heart of the message of the Savior of the world is a single, glorious, wonderful, still largely untried concept. In its simplest terms the message is that we should seek to overcome the selfishness we all seem to be born with, that we should overcome human nature and think of others before self.

To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beast

The howl of self-interest is loud ... but the heart is black which throbs solely to its note.