Meryl Streep Quotes

If I have resistance to something, it means there's something wrong. The resistance to me is a sign of fear.

Fear can make all of us do the wrong things sometimes.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

They hate whom they fear.

Today fear, the most corroding of influences, is the moving cause ...

I've always been, like a lot of people, driven by fear. Always focusing on the fire on the rope, as opposed to what the rope is coming from.

For me, playing a really bad character is about figuring out what brought the person to where we need him.

Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

Guilt can make you doubt yourself at the very moment when you need to proceed with certainty.

What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions.

Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.

The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

I have never met an aggressive person who wasn’t a fearful person.

There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear..." he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge.

Love doesn't need a reason. Hate needs a reason.

It was the first time I'd ever felt truly jealous of anyone else in my entire life.

Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.

I think, when people so strongly associate an actor with a character they play - but the main feeling is I feel very happy that I've been able to play somebody that people connect so strongly to. That's overall a very good feeling. There's the sweet and the sour, I guess. It does sting a little bit. Your insecurity as an actor maybe seeps in, but ultimately I think it's a very lovely thing. It doesn't happen that often. It's mostly good, I'm fine with it.

But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate.

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.

Fear can be the result of admiration, or it can be a symptom of contempt.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love.