It is actually a person’s rough edges and human imperfections that give others something to connect with.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

A companion's crudeness is bound to rub off on the one he is with, no matter how refined that person may be.

If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations.

Humans are not by nature solitary. They need to connect with other human beings to share dreams and fears, to lean on each other, to enhance each other.

We envy people whose traits compete with our desirability as a mate.

People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. The consequences of this fact, which goes under the name of sexual selection, are bizarre in the extreme.

Slightly calloused on the surface, we know that what tickles us often bruises others — because we deal with or deny it, we’re the last to cry uncle to bad luck.

Two bodies attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance.' It sounds like a rule for simple physical facts, does it not? Yet it is nothing of the sort; it was the poetical way the old ones had of expressing the rule of propinquity which governs the emotion of love. The bodies referred to are human bodies, mass is their capacity for love. Young people have a greater capacity for love than the elderly; when thy are thrown together they fall in love, yet when they are separated they soon get over it. 'Out of sight, out of mind.' It's as simple as that. But you were seeking some deep meaning for it.

Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crates to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that [humans] are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. ... It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

Humans connect with humans. Hiding one's humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting. I often refer to Nice Guys as Teflon Men. They work so hard to be smooth, nothing can stick to them. Unfortunately, this Teflon coating also makes it difficult for people to get close. It is actually a person's rough edges and human imperfections that give others something to connect with.

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.

Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.