Propensity Quotes - Page 6

• ... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

  Robert Musil

  Numbers, People, Temptation

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.274, University of Chicago Press

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• A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Religious, Strong

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.221, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial organisms when by any means they find their way into the blood. The propensity exhibited by the leukocytes for picking up inorganic granules is well known, and that they may be able not only to pick up but to assimilate, and so dispose of, the bacteria which come in their way does not seem to me very improbable in view of the fact that amoebae, which resemble them so closely, feed upon bacteria and similar organisms.

  George Miller Sternberg

  Mean, Science, White

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• A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils. It undermines the virtues necessary for the support of the social system, and encourages propensities destructive to its happiness. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy, and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation.

  Daniel Webster

  Wisdom, War, Evil

  Daniel Webster, Edward Everett (1853). “Speeches in the convention to amend the constitution of Massachusetts ; Speeches in Congress”, p.394

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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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• The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Arrows, Understanding, Together

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.860, Random House

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• Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

  Walter Lippmann

  Stress, Men, Temptation

  Walter Lippmann (1959). “The Public Philosophy”

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• Such is the effect of the grace of God in the heart of a pilgrim; while on one hand he sees the propensity of his evil nature to every sin which has been committed by others, and is humbled; he also confesses, that, by no power of his own, is he preserved, but ever gives the glory to the God of all grace, by whose power alone he is kept from falling.

  John Bunyan

  Fall, Heart, Hands

  John Bunyan (1869). “The Select Works of John Bunyan: Containing the Pilgrim's Progress ... with a Life of the Author”, p.85

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

  Ralph Cudworth

  Fruit, Forbidden Fruit, Forbidden

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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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• Requiring the payment of higher wages will lead to a loss of some jobs and a raising of prices which drives companies to search for automation to reduce costs. On the other hand, those receiving higher wages will spend more (the marginal propensity to consume is close to 1 for low income earners) and this will increase demand for additional goods and services. Henry Ford had the clearest vision of why companies can actually benefit by paying higher wages.

  Philip Kotler

  Jobs, Loss, Hands

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ... 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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