Mary Stewart Quotes

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

How can one know anything at all about people?

The reason I act is because I'm trying to understand why people are as they are.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

I suppose one of the things that interest me about acting is unpicking what makes people tick and why they do what they do and what it means to be human.

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

Vanity, shame, and above all disposition, often make men brave and women chaste.

Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

Considering how bad men are, it is wonderful how well they behave.

I like playing the social convention. If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time.

This idea that people have to love and understand each other is absurd. It's not human nature.

Person-to-person, most people are honest.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.

Dogs are nicer than people.

People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.

Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.

I don't think I was very structured in that society and I don't really believe in personal success, which most Americans believe in.

Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.

The best movies are made from a point of view of an understanding of human nature and an understanding of history and an understanding of what motivates people, of what makes a good movie from an emotional place.

School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

Is virtue raised by culture, or self-sown?

Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.

Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.