human nature

Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at. 

Perhaps the highest human potential is only realized when we no longer require the world to conform to our fantasies of how it should be.

Compassion vs. Power.
In life, beginning in infancy, we seek compassion.  Yet, we see power all around us, so we are curious.  We are offered compassion, but suspect that power is better.  So, when power is offered or available for taking, we often forget that compassion is the answer to our question.  Power is not an answer, but an endless question.

Compassion is the answer to our question.  Power is not an answer, but the begging of the question.

We humans, as a species, need to spend less time imagining
our metaphysical origins and more time pondering our unmistakably primate nature.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

The truth about human beings is, above all other forms of truth, something far too susceptible to our own willful and subjectivist distortions; by nature we never JUST LET SUCH A THING BE, or accept it as it is. Of all the decisive and strategic things that an intelligent human being needs to know about human beings, primary on the list would be this: human beings are overwhelmingly profoundly RESISTANT to knowing the truth about human nature. The one creature in all of organic nature that is capable of KNOWING its own nature is also, paradigmatic over all other creatures, the one most IN DENIAL about that nature. To ask of mortals that they should "know themselves" is little more than a cruel joke, japing at their crippled mentality and personality. Their grasp of this structural perversity or contrariety within human nature is the basis of all Greek wisdom, their aristic "misanthropy" or principled and profound distrust of human beings as pseudophiliacs. All that human beings are willing to call "truth" (for the most part) is some saccharine or cosmetic sweetness and light, some soporific opiate against all in human existence that might demand the utmost self-discipline, rationality, self-mastery, or spirituality from them.

So long as human nature remains viscerally resistant to enlightenment about its own slavish and self-stupefying necessities, there will ineluctably be suffering: truly, there is some suffering that is gratuitous (having no ground in our own karma or circles of obliquely willed actions upon ourselves), but in nature even the prey brings itself to the predator willingly but unwittingly. Even in the socially and economically and legally most utopian conditions, there will remain this irreducible self-obtuseness, self-evasiveness, self-irreality, in which men forever act as their own premier and unrecognized worst enemies, the obscure causes of their own self-suffering. And for the very same reasons that this suffering is uncomprehended for its true etiology, humans will also incurably continue to project blame onto others for their own self-injuries.

Human life is an extension of the principles of nature, and human civilization is a venture extrapolated out of human natures: man and his natural potential are the root of the entire human domain. The great task of all philosophizing is to become competent to interpret and steer the potential developmental forces in human natures and in the human condition, both of which are prodigiously fatalistic.

The three glues that hold humankind together are the courage of women, the compassion of men and the laughter of children.