Helen Hayes Quotes

You just are born the way that you're born.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don't make, in life-defining matters. That moment of 'angst' and its consequences can be such a cruel thing.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

I just feel like people are who they are.

I'm not a machine.

It's not the skunk's fault that he's a skunk or that he gives off this really bad stink. If I am a skunk, I want to live as a skunk, I want to know what my truth is, to know the person I am without fear.

There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.

It's a hell of a thing to be born, and if you're born you're at least entitled to your own self.

The actor is not quite a human being-but then, who is?

Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

I have that need in me, I want everyone to love me, but I'm embarrassed by that need, so I wanted to cover it up in my persona. I felt like I wouldn't be able to do stand-up for a career if I was needy. I didn't want to be complaining or whining onstage. I wanted to be cool and do exactly what I wanted to do. That way I would never have to change for anybody.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.

Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)

So I should be aware of the dangers of self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man, but not another.