Wendell Berry Quotes

We all have to control our feelings. That's the thing that separates us from animals.

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.

I'm not sorry, it's human nature.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

The bad propensities of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no scope for their indulgence

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.

Casting judgments is an integral feature of what makes us human.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature - the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.

The show's writers had peppered the piece with words like "savage," "wild," and "animalistic." What bullshit. Show me the animal that kills for the thrill of watching something die. Why does the stereotype of the animalistic killer persist? Because humans like it. It neatly explains things for them, moving humans to the top of the evolutionary ladder and putting killers down among mythological man-beast monsters like werewolves. The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.

Thirst teaches all animals to drink, but drunkenness belongs only to man.

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

Do not make Mistakes about Character. That is the worst and yet easiest error. Better be cheated in the price than in the quality of goods. In dealing with men, more than with other things, it is necessary to look within. To know men is different from knowing things. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?" "It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize." "Must be a human thing." "Exactly.

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

We always do what's natural, only sometimes we shouldn't do it.

People are just greedy animals, after all.

It's human nature, we take a mile when we're given an inch. We're crazy. You see what we did to the animals! They don't even exist anymore!

Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.