Human Complexity Quotes

People have more dimensions to them than we give them credit for. The person you meet on the street that you think is someone, and it's someone else. I'm mistaken for someone else all the time.

When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.

I believe that each person is more than the worst thing they've ever done.

Individuals are complex and deserve to be recognized as such.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

Humans are vulnerable, messy little animals and that's normal. And all I want to do is make a space for that in my films.

Many are the marvels of God's Creation, but none so marvelous as man. Or so cunning, for good and ill.

The nature of man is intricate. The objects of society are of the greatest complexity and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs.

It was sometimes difficult to reconcile a man's talents with his personality.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

Listen, I think movies serve many different purposes, from those movies that are frivolous and just an entertainment, to movies that just go to exploring the complexities of the human soul. Everything is valid if it's done with honesty and dignity, and I actually do both of those types of movies in my career.

I'm not interested in the heroes or the villains. I'm interested in playing people.

I grew up as a Christian, and one of the many things in Christian mythology that did not dovetail with real life is that human beings are not monochromatic in their being.

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

Nobody really knows anybody completely, even if they've been married to 'em for 53 years, you know?

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded.