Complexity of Human Behavior Quotes

There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

Bad people sometimes do good things, and good people do really bad things or do something the audience disagrees with.

Man in sooth is a marvellous, vain, fickle, and unstable subject.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bare ass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

No one does anything from a single motive.

There's really no "bad" people; there's just humans who are doing the best they can to figure life out. It's hard! We can all relate to that.

People are the most fascinating mysteries I've ever read.

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.

We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us.

Humans are capable of so much creativity and goodness and at the same time they are destructive and cruel. (Leta)

The more I deal in it, the surer I am that human nature is all of the same critter, but that there's a heap of choice in the cuts.

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

People who can be very good can be very bad too.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.