“The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.”
“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”
Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 2, “The Relation of Mathematics to Physics,” p. 58
“The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.”
"On the Literary Character" (28 October 1813)
The Round Table (1815-1817)
The Rights of Man (1945). London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 7–8.
Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism <!-- p. 183 -->
Context: As Bovet has demonstrated in the field of morals, rules do not appear in the mind of the child as innate facts, but as facts that are transmitted to him by his seniors, and to which from his tenderest years he has to conform by means of a sui generis form of adaptation. This, of course, does not prevent some rules from containing more than others an element of rationality, thus corresponding to the deepest fundamental constants of human nature. But whether they be rational or simply a matter of usage and consensus of opinion, rules imposed on the childish mind by adult constraint do begin by presenting a more or less uniform character of exteriority and sheer authority. So that instead of passing smoothly from an early individualism (the "social" element of the first months is only biologically social, so to speak, inside the individual, and therefore individualistic) to a state of progressive cooperation, the child is from his first year onwards in the grip of coercive education which goes straight on and ends by producing what Claprède has so happily called a veritable "short circuit."
Letter to Mitchell Kennerley about the book Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace, October 1, 1917 https://books.google.com/books?id=Gr6atcdK37EC&pg=PA123 https://books.google.com/books?id=2BL2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA2383
1910s
recounting Desmond McCarthy’s description of Samuel Johnson, “English Aphorists,” p. 138
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)
From a lecture, "Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science" given at the International Symposium in recognition of Robert R. Wilson on April 27, 1979 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois.
