Contradictory Traits Quotes

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.

The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.

The trouble is the kind of guy I want to go out with doesn't even exist... Like a rugged, chain-smoking, intellectual, adventurer guy who's really serious, but also really funny and mean.

That big guy, Winfield, at 6'6", can do things only a small man can do.

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.

The prince in 'The Leopard' was a very complex character - at times autocratic, rude, strong - at times romantic, good, understanding - and sometimes even stupid, and above all, mysterious.

This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, this Senior Junior, giant dwarf...Cupid.

Pete Rose is the most likable arrogant person I've ever met.

I'm quite a compulsive person-I only worked this out recently - I'm compulsive, but I'm also very indecisive. I don't know what I want, but I know that I want it now.

Of faith in God he [Frederick II, the Great] had none; he was crafty, wily, avaricious, lustful, malicious, wrathful; and yet a gallant man times, when he would show his kindness or courtesy; full of solace jocund, delightful, fertile in devices. He knew to read, write, and sing, to make songs and music. He was a comely man, and well formed, but of middle stature …. he knew how to speak with many and varied tongues, and, to be brief, if he had been rightly Catholic, and had loved God and His Church, he would have had few emperors his equals in the world.

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.

If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it's easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.

More than one side? You're Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!

The women I cast have to embody all sorts of contradictions... I have to find the right woman to speak to other women.

I'm a pretty chaotic person, but I'm also a perfectionist. It's a very unfortunate mix.

It's difficult in the abstract to appreciate that those with morally objectionable viewpoints can still be good people.

One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

I am aware that I've generally been more attracted to introspective roles, but it's sort of bizarre, because it's the opposite of who I am in many ways. I think I'm quite an extroverted, loud person. So it interests me that that's sort of the place that I go all quiet, is when I'm onscreen. It's a bit strange.

You say he's childish, but he's very professional about business transactions.

I like characters who are contradictory.

Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person.

What character actors want to do is investigate new types of people and present them in all their idiosyncrasies, psychological complexities, and contradictory stupidities. That has been one of the great delights over our seven collaborations.

To be a preacher requires two apparently contradictory qualities: confidence and humility.

Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience.