Amy Tan Quotes

You know what mom told me once? She said that everyone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil in ourselves, so we're able to forgive them.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

I hope you will be yourself, human, even a little sentimental, possessed of a sense of humor and a sense of humility. . . . There are arrogant people in this world and, what is worse, arrogant judges.

Every man has a bag hanging before him, in which he puts his neighbour's faults, and another behind him in which he stows his own.

The reason we see hypocrisy and fraud and unreality in others is because they are all in our own hearts. The great characteristic of a saint is humility-Yes, all those things and other evils would have been manifested in me but for the grace of God, therefore I have no right to judge.

Before you condemn me my friends, I suggest you look deep inside you. For good and evil exists in us all.

I don't really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are. For example, if people wish I would sound like I used to sound, then it says more about them than it does me.

You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

We tend to see our character flaws as simple defects, and the simple defects of others as character flaws.

Compassion without wisdom is dangerous. It's what enables people to support the 'underdog,' even if the underdog is evil

It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.

I don't take anything personally. I am a secondary character in other people's stories. I know that whatever people say about me is just a projection of their image of me. It has nothing to do with me.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

I think evil is very relative.

Either accept people for what they are, or don't. So, in other words, man, if people don't know me, I think they do themself an injustice. Because, as a whole, I think I'm a good person.

I find that people... very few people think that what they're doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they're doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.

It's easy to see the faults in people I know; it's hardest to see the good. Especially when the good isn't there.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Our concerns aren't always appropriate or morally elevated.

I'm one of the most sensitive human beings on Earth - and I know it.

To say of men that they are bad is to say they are worse than we think we are, or worse than the ideal man whose image we have built up on the basis of a certain few.

O, would some Power give us, To see ourselves as others see us!