James Thurber Quotes

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.

Each day the worst of our faults, our deficiencies, our crimes, the truth of our lives, is stifled under a triple layer of forgetfulness, death and the ordinary course of justice.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

Never underestimate the capacity of another human being to have exactly the same shortcomings you have.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

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

What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions?

As in the infirmity of human nature, no man's actions are always what he likes to look back upon, as there are points in which he would wish that he had acted otherwise; so every man who tells his own story is under a temptation more or less to disguise the truth; and the more in proportion as his actions have been upon a larger scale, and his faults or mistakes therefore have been more flagrant.

I think the single most important, fascinating, and complex aspect of human nature is that we all know, deep down, that we are not what we ought to be - or as John Doe says in 'Seven,' 'We are not what was intended.'

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

We're all flawed human beings trying to be better but there's consequences to your actions and you have to be accountable for 'em.

Starting with the lyrics, 'Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I'm a king, I'm the dirt, God within me shine,' the first half of '6 Weeks' delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

You can't just blame things on evil. Everyone's a human, so when people say that somebody's behaving 'inhuman,' it's not. It's very human - it's just not a very nice side of it.

We are all people who have messed up. I fall short every single day.

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

You've got to demand the truth from yourself.

Although I do wrong, I do not the wrongs that I am charged with doing; the wrong that I do is through the frailty of human nature, like other men. No man lives without fault.

I didn't have evil intentions, but I guess I did have power.

I try to be a good person. I know what my downfalls are, so that's a good thing.

When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'

Most faults are not in our Constitution, but in ourselves.

I'm simply trying to tell the truth about human behaviour as I see it.