Lion Feuchtwanger Quotes

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Exploring the dark side of my characters' personality is my forte.

It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

Every true genius is bound to be naive.

Counterintuitive actions prove we can trust real knowledge and do the opposite of what we feel makes sense.

I have an interest in understanding evil. Who is the bad guy - the vampire who kills people and sucks their blood, or the survivalists who kill people to save their own lives? Is evil merely a creation of people? Or is there an evil nature? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? I really like these questions.

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.

I'm a hopeless romantic. I buy things because I fall in love with them. I never buy anything just because it's valuable.

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It's dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.

It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Some of the best ideas that we've invested in have made no sense to conventional sources.

Playing evil is just not interesting. I don't think anyone who does evil stuff thinks they're doing evil stuff. That's the scary part.

In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.

In the end we're all Jerry Springer Show guests, really, we just haven't been on the show.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

People always want an explanation about everything and I cannot give it to them. Because I don't know myself. 'Why did you do a pair of pants like that?' I have no idea. I'm not going to have a 20-minute political discussion about the necessity for slashed, painted leather jeans. Basically, I don't know more than you.

We're all caught up in circumstances, and we're all good and evil. When you're really hungry, for instance, you'll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing - well, maybe that's too strong - but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion.

There are some decision-makers in the world whose version of sanity is a little different from what I consider the right one.

I don't think of the characters as being good or bad because that doesn't help me as a writer.

There's a creative freedom with being under the radar. But I guess if you're too under the radar, you get canceled?

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

Alien ideas are just as dangerous to us as the aliens themselves, no matter how plausible.