Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

I don't see people. I don't see men and women at all. When I see them, I see... their mothers and fathers. I see how old they are inside. Like when I look at the president, or anybody in a record company, or a store owner, I may see a little boy behind the counter with the face of an old man. And that's who I talk to.

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

A woman not only takes her identity and individuality for granted, but knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love.

I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.

I can't stand that - those women in 'Waiting to Exhale' now. I can't stand them. But that's because I'm 53 and not 33. But what they were experiencing at 33, I identified with it.

It's kind of a Peter Pan thing: I want to stay a kid. I love it. But I guess you have to grow up someday. Everybody does.

One should mature over 20 years.

I can't pretend to be a teenager, but I feel like I never really stopped being a teenager.

I'm a mammal at the end. I breathe out and breathe in and eat. At the end, when we go to sleep, nobody lives this political definition. It's something we connect by and we try to understand each other by, but at the end, we know that this is not who we are.

People reach an age... where somebody else's platform is no longer yours.

Kids don't shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.

I love, I love human beings, studying them.

There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.

After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.

We think the whole world's going to change, and forget that human beings are still human beings; we have the same five senses, we still interact the same way, we still love and hate the same way, but marketers lose track of that. But then it comes down to earth.

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.

I've always wanted to be older, as I think it's all right to be a little bit odd when you're out of your 20s.

One must love humanity in order to reach out into the unique essence of each individual: no one can be too low or too ugly.

I always had an easier time with adults. Somehow, I was always old! I still feel old.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

Children who have been in work for a long time suddenly get a thud down to earth once the cuteness fades, hips widen, voices drop and jawlines strengthen.

As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.

People become more interesting from about 25 - they develop character and their personalities come out.