Sophie Swetchine Quotes

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

In all known time there has never been a greater monster or miracle than the human being.

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

I'm totally human.

Humanity has both its beautiful and its ugly sides.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

Man is a paradoxical being - the constant glory and scandal of this world.

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.