Leo Tolstoy Quotes

If you look at the play very closely, this is a thirdhand report of what a wonderful hero Macbeth is for saving Scotland. And in the next scene, he's planning to murder Duncan, and you never really know why or what's behind Macbeth.

There are always two forces warring against each other within us.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

There's a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It's still troubling and stressful to me.

An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.

Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better.

I think many people have contradictions to them and I love characters that deal with those contradictions.

If you've ever liked an artist or someone who then does something or is accused of something extremely corrupt, and your moral conscience won't allow you to accept that artist, the truth is then that creates a void in your life. Because then something you loved was taken from you.

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

It's always interesting to see somebody struggling with two different sides of their personality.

I always had a sense of where I was going with 'Dark Phoenix.' Jean had the greatest power imaginable... and, how's she going to deal with that?

The nameless loser in Jay McInerney's 'Bright Lights, Big City' is going to the dogs like a gentleman. He is too smart to blame anyone for the impasse he has come to, hip enough to know he does not know enough, too sophisticated to masquerade as an anti-hero.

Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

In the end you become part of everything you hate, basically.

Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

If we cannot be powerful and happy and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.

Tis a blushing shame-faced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that (by chance) I found. It beggars any man that keeps it.

Could I betray my absent heart to save my pathetic life?

Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse; We make of our own enemies our guests.

I understood all that in my head, but I still didn‟t believe it in my heart.

The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.