Deborah Harkness Quotes

The things that motivate human beings, they don't change, emotionally.

Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.

I truly have come to believe that there are only two states of being that generate our thoughts: LOVE or FEAR.

The world is ruled, and the destiny of civilization is established, by the human emotions.

There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear..." he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge.

No human is completely fearless.

We are human beings. We operate from wanting to be rewarded.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist.

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire

I still ponder what gets in people's minds and souls, why they do the things they do.

To be honest, while every market is very different, we are all still fundamentally moved and inspired by similar human truths - love, fear, belonging, desire, and so on.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

Fear is stronger than love

I am more interested in what moves people, than how they move.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

People are motivated by fear, but they are not inspired by it. Everything that inspires us comes from love.

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

People's motivations haven't changed in maybe 400 or maybe 4,000 years.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love.