Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.

You cannot put straight in others what is warped in yourself.

As long as we are human, we are destined to make mistakes. We all fall prey to flawed beliefs and views. What separates a forward-looking person from an intransigent one, a virtuous person from a malevolent one, however, is whether one can candidly admit to ones mistakes and take bold steps to redress them.

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

In other men we faults can spy,/ And blame the mote that dims their eye;/ Each little speck and blemish find;/ To our own stronger errors blind.

I think looking at your own life, on- and offscreen, you can motivate anything, or you can delude yourself into anything.

You can only see in others what is inside of you.

It’s hard to see the whole picture when you are in the frame.

Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.

We're a whole culture of people who have a really hard time seeing beyond themselves.

Whoever claims to understand another person completely, is either entirely ignorant of himself, or else has a nature so small that he can measure it easily, and supposes it to be the standard of every other nature.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

One might say that the novel is the genre that most predisposes one to a profound insight into the tremendous life around us, instead of putting forward one's own tiny ego as the centre of the universe.

It's easy to see the faults in people I know; it's hardest to see the good. Especially when the good isn't there.

I just want to portray a very honest character that displays traits that people can truly relate to and can help them - the audience and myself because I learn from the characters as well - help them see themselves in a perspective that is outside of what they know already, and grow from that experience.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me.

We need an opposition to remind us if we are making mistakes. When you are not opposed you think everything you do is right.

Where I Was Wrong

Being unbiased is a lot like being humble: as soon as you think you are, you aren’t. Neither are a finite state of being but a continuous struggle to not allow our perspectives poison our opinions.

You can't be a great comedian without having self-awareness about others or your own faults. You need a strong sense of self and view on the world. That's what great actors have, too.

I never feel like I'm looking to get away from my own self. Not as much as I'm trying to get inside the mind of somebody else.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.