Propensity Quotes - Page 7

• High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth. Of all our planet's activities - geological movements, the reproduction and decay of biota, and even the disruptive propensities of certain species (elephants and humans come to mind) - no force is greater than the hydrologic cycle.

  Richard Bangs

  Dream, Rain, Elephants

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• You may suppress natural propensities by force, but they will be certain to re-appear.

  Horace

  May, Natural, Certain

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• We have all a propensity to grasp at forbidden fruit.

  Ralph Cudworth

  Fruit, Forbidden Fruit, Forbidden

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• My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation.

  Carol Gilligan

  Men, Vocabulary, Self

  Carol GILLIGAN (2009). “In a Different Voice”, p.131, Harvard University Press

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• For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare.

  Mary Webb

  Death, Dream, Dark

  Mary Webb (2016). “Gone To Earth”, p.194, Mary Webb

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• Nothing but the cross of Christ can so startle the spiritual nature from its torpor, as to make it an effectual counterpoise to the debasing and sensual tendencies of the race. Favored by temperament and education, individuals may measurably escape; but if the race is to triumph in the conflict between the flesh and the spirit, between the lower propensities and the higher nature, they must, as Constantine is said to have done, see the cross, and on it the motto, "In hoc signo vinces." By this sign we conquer.

  Mark Hopkins

  Spiritual, Race, Sensual

  MARK HOPKINS (1862). “BACCALAUREATE SERMONS, AND OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES”, p.189

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• It ever is the marked propensity of restless and aspiring minds to look into the stretch of dark futurity.

  Joanna Baillie

  Dark, Mind, Looks

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• People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Thinking, People, Soul

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• The curse of modern times is the propensity of male hormones in places where they can do the most damage

  Robert James Waller

  Males, Damage, Modern

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• Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

  William James

  Lying, Men, Differences

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.52, University of Illinois Press

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• Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

  Herman Melville

  Money, Animal, Men

  Herman Melville (2012). “Moby Dick (Illustrated & Annotated Edition)”, p.446, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

  Herbert Spencer

  Teacher, Children, Character

  Herbert Spencer (1873). “Social Statics; Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, & the First of Them Developed”, p.201

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• I am more and more convinced, of the propensity in human nature to tyranize over their fellow men.

  Mercy Otis Warren

  Men, Fellow Man, Human Nature

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• I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Mean, Intelligent, Misunderstood

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more”, p.276, e-artnow

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• ... these great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and religious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.

  Harriot Kezia Hunt

  Religious, Flower, Animal

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• I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other; besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity.

  Anne Bronte

  Drinking, Men, Giving

  Anne Bronte (2006). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, p.247, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• And the propensity of weak and empty people to follow a leader into the darkness from which there is no return is still flourishing, as ever.

  Mary McGrory

  Leadership, Women, People

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• No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing.... Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Hero, Writing, Men

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• There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.

  David Hume

  Hurt, Army, Moon

  David Hume (1957). “The Natural History of Religion”, p.29, Stanford University Press

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• Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every pagewe soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.

  David Hume

  Battle, Oracles, May

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• We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Maturity, Order, Years

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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• He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.

  Douglas Adams

  Successful, Car, Getting Lost

  Douglas Adams (2016). “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.266, Simon and Schuster

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