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.
Complete non-violence is complete absence of ill-will against all that lives. It therefore embraces even sub-human life, not excluding noxious insects and beasts. They have not been created to feed our destructive propensities. If we only knew the mind of the Creator, we should find their proper place in His creation.
If thou wishest to get rid of thy evil propensities, thou must keep far from evil companions.
The love of money as a possession-as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life-will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease
In fact, Darwin's own grandfather anticipated the central tenet of Lamarckism by some seven years: "All animals undergo perpetual transformations; which are in part produced by their own exertions. . . and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity. "
If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.
St. Augustine teaches us that there is in each man a Serpent, an Eve, and an Adam. Our senses and natural propensities are the Serpent; the excitable desire is the Eve; and reason is the Adam. Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents.
You may suppress natural propensities by force, but they will be certain to re-appear.
He who harbors hatred and bitterness injures himself far more than the one towards whom he manifests these evil propensities.
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.
All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
A fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility - alive, with the qualifications of the dead - dead, with the propensities of the living - an anomaly on the face of the earth - being very calm, yet breathless.
No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament.
Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.
If Copenhagen were a person, that person would be generous, beautiful, elderly, but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling, filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old - somebody who takes good care of things and of people.
Along with our many human propensities, we evolved a huge cerebral cortex with which we make decisions.
