Samuel Johnson Quotes

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

Mind and body obstruct one another's pleasures.

Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail.

You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.

Man's inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. Some people just do evil things. Most do not. A billion people have seen 'Batman' movies over the past 20 years, and they have been entertained and inspired. One man saw it as a sick entry point for mass murder. The one is tragic. The billion are not. I choose to write for the billion.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.

We all possess the need to dream.

You can be enticed by food, wooed by food, sex, money, or instruments.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

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

When it comes to power as it functions between humans, it all comes down to desire. If you know what someone wants, you can control them. It is as simple as that. And the reverse is also true: If you have control over your own desires, no one will ever own you. As humans, we are plagued with desire - it consumes us, it fuels us, it destroys us.

In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.

We never cease wanting what we want, whether it's good for us or not.

It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.

Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.

Brave people may be persuaded to an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it really is.

Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.

Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.

There were people whom I considered friends or loved ones who either abandoned me or betrayed me in ways I'd never have suspected. But there were others who had been barely acquaintances of mine whose loyalty and efforts on my behalf made me realize that not everyone was as inherently rotten as I'd previously believed. So it caused a violent split in my view of humanity - people turned out to be far worse and far better than I'd ever dreamed possible.

Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who while he was chill was harmless; but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison.

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.