Inherent Tendencies Quotes

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.

What we call human nature, is actually human habit.

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

I feel like money makes you more of who you already are.

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

Only - only that, if you believe the tales, it's in the nature of our people to go to war and to kill, just as it is to sing and play and tell stories. Perhaps they are two halves of the same whole.

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

Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

We are addicted to being the way we are

Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.

No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

Habit is a second nature.

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament".

Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us

Inherited aptitudes and traits of temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of life.

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men.

Some children are born from heaven and others are born from hell, because each human being has his inherent tendencies, and these tendencies belong to his spirit, and indicate the state in which he existed before he was born.