T. S. Eliot Quotes

For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.

This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.

All the rarest hues of human life take radiance and are rainbowed out in tears.

To be human is to have a whole spectrum of these experiences that arise within us.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.

Mankind is a science that defies definitions.

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

Trying to figure things out was my gig. Without the human condition, there's no struggle, no pain and that means no laughter.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself- and to do so takes AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter. Love and desire and hate; I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.