William Saroyan Quotes

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

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.

The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.

I did not succeed in everything I did. And even where it did seem I was succeeding it was not always the case. The human heart has a million facets.

When you peered into the windows of someone else's life, you could only guess what was going on.

It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.

But sometimes you have to wait for an answer to come to you. Especially when the questions are difficult ones.

We must learn a new modesty. We have stormed the heavens, but succeeded only in building fog upon fog, a mist which will not support anybody who earnestly desires to stand upon it. What is valid seems so insignificant that it may be seriously doubted whether anlaysis is at all possible.

What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

You make some big grandoise decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself.

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

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.

I find the more you analyze, the less you really know.

What I learned is that it's arrogant to be certain of anything. The world is a complex place and only idiots or assholes think they know it all.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.