Fulke Greville Quotes

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

Human beings are glorious and preposterous characters.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

I'm very interested in what makes people tick; people are so weird and complicated.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

I'm fascinated with psychology, and with why a person walks the way they walk or why they walk into a room the way they do or why we are the way we are, and it's not exclusive to the psychology of a character.

The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.

Temperament is the thermometer of character.

Everybody's a bit screwed up, you know. You can take it as symptoms of a disorder, or you can take it as personality. Me, I'd rather think it as parts of personality.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.

There is a variety in tempers of good men.

I am very interest in the human condition. That is what I love about acting. I like studying different people and their psychosis. I like discovering what makes them tick. I always find that with any character I play. I need to find out what makes them tick.

Consistency is a human word, but it certainly expresses nothing human.

People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are.

Character: the grandest thing in the world.

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

It is quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.

It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.