Quotes & Sayings About Human Nature In Night

Like the lotus flower, business blooms in the mud, and in the dark of night. The lotus is an amazing creation of God, because for all of its beauty, it is the sum total of work performed in a mess. It is also a creation that has the ability to create seeds in its habitat for a very long time without help from human hands. The lotus has the ability to survive beyond the mercurial nature of weather (storms, frost). The lotus is one strong, powerful, and resilient flower that blossoms in a substance (mud) that none of us would want to touch. — Robin Caldwell

Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated. — Camille

In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature. — Hanya Yanagihara

Ethan tries not to look back on that night. At least, as much as human nature allows. But it's a funny thing about your darkest moments. They have a life of their own. They come around because they've got you pinned. Because they can. The harder you try to push them back into the shadows, the stronger they grow. They draw power from your resistance. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

The Yognul people of Australia thought the constellation represented a canoe. But as we move into the southern hemisphere, a marked change in the nature of the constellations becomes apparent. The southern constellations were named by explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead of great heroes and gods, we have the keels of ships, sextants, telescopes and the like, things that mattered most to the people of this era. What constellations would we put in the night sky today? Indeed, when human beings go out and colonise the stars, what constellations will they put up in their night skies? — Paul Abel

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky. — Bill McKibben

Parmida had never believed in unicorns, not until a stroll through the forests of Sunneth Dol convinced her otherwise. She was a young human woman living in a world where magick was dead and magickal creatures a myth. Elves and fae and magickal beasts had long ago shed their skin and left their bones. It was a world where humans alone now existed, walking in the dark of night, always looking over their shoulder for their inevitable extinction, as if nature were waiting to absorb them next back into her soil. — Ash Gray

Even if everybody is looking at the same light bulb, the unique composition of an individual will dictate how they interpret and see things. Some people will only see things with their left eye (mind/moon), while others will use only their right (heart/sun). Some people are completely void of light and repel it immediately. For instance, a beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are we different than the insects? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature - human or not human. — Suzy Kassem

[For] decades, researchers have told us that the link between cataclysm and social disintegration is a myth perpetuated by movies, fiction, and misguided journalism. In fact, in case after case, the opposite occurs: In the earthquake and fire of 1906, Jack London observed: "never, in all San Francisco's history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror." "We did not panic. We coped," a British psychiatrist recalled after the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings. We often assume that such humanity among survivors, what author Rebecca Solnit has called "a paradise built in hell," is an exception after catastrophes, specific to a particular culture or place. In fact, it is the rule. — Jonathan M. Katz

Night possessed us and the shadow of death encompassed us, for we had fallen into sin and lost the power of sight which was ours by God's grace and by which we were able to perceive the light that bestows true life. Night and death had been poured out on our human nature, not because of any change in the true light, but because we had turned aside and no longer had any inclination towards the life-bearing light. In the last times, however, the Giver of eternal light and Source of true life has had mercy upon us. — Gregory Palamas

He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man — John Le Carre

One of the great arts in living is to learn the art of accurately appraising values. Everything that we think, that we earn, that we have given to us, that in any way touches our consciousness, has its own value. These values are apt to change with the mood, with time, or because of circumstances. We cannot safely tie to any material value. The values of all material possessions change continually, sometimes over night. Nothing of this nature has any permanent set value. The real values are those that stay by you, give you happiness and enrich you. They are the human values. — George Matthew Adams

People do terrible things. People do beautiful things. It's against the black backdrop of evil that the shining light of good shows the brightest. We can't just focus on the darkness of the night, or we'll miss out on the stars. — Wendy Mills

The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living. — Tana French

Clinch's efforts in love were always of a mothering sort, for it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive, and it was a mother that Edgar Clinch most craved - his own having died in his infancy, and since then been resurrected as a goddess of shining virtue in his mind, a goddess whose face was as a blurred shape, seen through a window on a night of fog. — Eleanor Catton

In the blackness of the midnight sleep world, immunized from the harsh glare of daytime reality, the active imagination of the soul dances in the mind of a dream weaver. Safely shrouded in the all-encompassing blanket of darkness supplied by nighttime sleep, our secret wishes speak to us by channeling the collective mythology of the primordial mind. During the wee hours of night, right before first light, we summon our personal muse to tell us in operatic fashion what it means to be human. If we listen carefully, our muse's heart songs shares with us what it means to experience both the tragedy and comedy of life, and encourages us to unreservedly embrace in a moral manner the banality, brutality, beauty, and splendor of nature that occurs eternally in the cosmic world that swaddles us. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel. — W. Somerset Maugham

She held the moth to the light. It was nearer brown than yellow,and she remembered having seen some like it in the boxes that afternoon.It was not the one needed to complete the collection,but Elnora might want it,so Mrs. Comstock held on. Then the Almighty was kind,or nature was sufficient,as you look at it,for following the law of its being when disturbed,the moth again threw the spray by which some suppose it attracts its kind,and liberally sprinkled Mrs. Comstock's dress front and arms. From that instant,she became the best moth bait ever invented. Every Polyphemus in range hastened to her,and other fluttering creatures of night followed. The influx came her way. She snatched wildly here and there until she had one in each hand and no place to put them. She could see more coming,and her aching heart,swollen with the strain of long excitement,hurt pitifully.She prayed in broken exclamations that did not always sound reverent,but never was a human soul more intense earnest. — Gene Stratton-Porter

Things that live by night live outside the realm of 'normal' time and so suggest living outside the realm of good and evil, since we have moralistic feelings about time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good at a time when they have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms. — Diane Ackerman

The moment comes when the great nurse, death, takes a human, the child, by the hand and quietly says, "It is time to go home. Night is coming. It is your bedtime, child of earth. Come; you're tired. Lie down at last in the quiet nursery of nature and sleep. Sleep well. The day is gone. Stars shine in the canopy of eternity." — Joshua L. Liebman

No doubt hard work is a great police agent. If everybody were worked from morning till night, and then carefully locked up, the register of crime might be greatly diminished. But what would become of human nature? Where would be the room for growth in such a system of things? It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and need, a variety of passions, circumstances, and temptations, even through sin and misery, that men's natures are developed. — Arthur Helps

All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it. — Marcel Proust

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side. — Elizabeth Goudge

Dear Jesus, please get me out. Christ, please, please, please, Christ. If you only keep me from being killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please, please, dear Jesus' The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. — Ernest Hemingway,

I sat on a somewhat higher sand dune and watched the eastern sky. Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale, [ ... ] than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could comprehend. As I sat and watched, the feeling overtook me that my very life was slowly dwindling into nothingness. There was no trace here of anything as insignificant as human undertakings. This same event had been occurring hundreds of millions - hundreds of billions - of times, from an age long before there had been anything resembling life on earth. — Haruki Murakami

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small
like looking at the Big Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you. — Christopher Morley

At last the sun rose, and then my companions seemed to sleep easier. The difficulties under which they had laboured all night, and which had found utterance in the most terrific gasps and snorts, are not to be conceived. As the sun got higher, their sleep became lighter, and so they gradually one by one awoke. I recollect being very much surprised by the feint everybody made, then, of not having been to sleep at all, and by the uncommon indignation with which everyone repelled the charge. I labour under the same kind of astonishment to this day, having invariably observed that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach. — Charles Dickens

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. — Alan Furst

Bright Star
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death. — John Keats

My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.
What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.
The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety's extended cheek.
The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is 'not to bow down before the law').
A poet doesn't justify - he doesn't accept - nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it — Georges Bataille

And on the night before he suffers the worst that wayward human culture can do, this is what he does: he takes bread and wine into his hands, lifts them up, and blesses them. Bread and wine, not wheat and grapes. Bread and wine are culture, not just nature. They are good for food and a delight to the eyes. Jesus takes culture, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to his friends. Taken, broken, blessed, and given, these cultural goods, these "creatures of bread and wine" as the old prayer book had it, become sign and presence of God in the world. — W. David O. Taylor

It was hard to be human. Hell, it was hard to live at all. Life was definitely not for the meek.
Everytime something seemed to go right, at least 3 or 4 things had to go wrong. It was just the law of nature. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine. — Emily Greene Balch

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace. — George MacDonald

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature
as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance. — Annie Dillard