Andrea Arnold Quotes

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

It's hard to know exactly how people develop the characters they do. There could be people from humble beginnings that turn into jerks. Some characteristics are just part of that special soul of that human being.

I'm very much a person of nurture over nature. When the world is not nurturing, it can really change a man.

Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

Nobody starts out evil - we know that. It's life circumstances that lead them to that.

We can understand both our nature and our nurture, but understanding is only the first step.

We're all a result of our early years and our nature and nurture.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

Violent behavior exists in one's psychological makeup much deeper than the level that receives information from television or movies.

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

I was a Sedgewick without the smarts. It infused its way into me and I feel like it formed my character in a big way because of what I was exposed to.

A person's current personality of love, hatred, jealousy, rage or a murderous intent and so on is formed upon genetic elements, education, the environment and a family a person grows in.

That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

I think to try to understand human behavior and why people do what they do, and what in their lives have shaped them and impacted them to be who they are, it's something. I mean, that's my entire life.

I learned a lot about human nature. So much, in fact, that human nature will be my specialist subject on 'Mastermind'.

I've studied human psychology my whole life.

Everyone is a product of their own environment, and that, I think, has actually been the key lesson for me.

The older I got, I started to realize more it's not necessarily that any of us are inherently bad or good; you just kind of carve your own way, and you are your experiences and your surroundings and what you grow up in.

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.