Honore de Balzac Quotes

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.

Biology always beats will power.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

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

Human nature is largely something that has to be overcome.

The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.

We don't invent our natures. They're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and everything else.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

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

The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.

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

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

You just are born the way that you're born.

When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.

The rules of wildlife are simple and clear, which is not the case for men.

For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

Unteachable from infancy to tomb — There is the first & main characteristic of mankind.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

I think most people have a natural instinct to rebel.