Pramoedya Ananta Toer Quotes

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

He's very nice. He's something I replied. She considered this zipping her purse shut. Then she said Well everyone is. Everyone is Something. For some reason that stuck with me simple and yet not every since she'd said it. It was like a puzzle as well two vague words with one clear one between them.

i can't understand her" well son, you might as well try to understand the sun". derived form the book:fires of heaven by robert jordan.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

I like to watch mankind in its futile attempt to understand the unknown, when they don't even understand that which they know.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

You come to realize people are not simple.

Those who understand only what can be explained understand very little.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

Economic theory does not work with human beings. We are far too messy.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

You meet people, and you're like, 'I don't know how I feel about you,' and someone does something surprising that changes your mind. We're interesting creatures; we're nuanced, complicated and layered, and we make all sorts of choices.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

They understand but a little who understand only what can be explained.

Common sense is so very simple but very difficult to grasp.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

There is no accounting for human beings.