Paul Neilan Quotes

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

It is unwise to wish everything explained.

Hope is a tease designed to prevent us from accepting reality.

I just never count on anything. You can't.

Everyone is such a mystery, yet we chug along so much of the time presuming we're all on the same page.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.

I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.

If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.

And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose - that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, Everybody knows that the war is over, Everybody knows the good guys lost.

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

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

There’s no accounting for the mysteries of the human heart

The meaning of life is that nobody knows the meaning of life.

Behind me there are already so many memories (...) Lots of memories, but no point in remembering them, and ahead of me a long, long road with nothing to aim for ... I just don't want to go along it.

Life is a mystery,but man wants to reduce it to a problem!

...Sometimes I suspect that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.

Keep the extent of your abilities unknown.The wise man does not allow his knowledge and abilities to be sounded to the bottom, if he desires to be honored at all. He allows you to know them but not to comprehend them. No one must know the extent of his abilities, lest he be disappointed. No one ever has an opportunity of fathoming him entirely. For guesses and doubts about the extent of his talents arouse more veneration than accurate knowledge of them, be they ever so great.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

When I can't immediately define the character, and there's an element of mystery to it and still a lot to be explored, that's when I say yes.

Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being