Richard Wright Quotes

The human heart is a factory of idols...Everyon e of us is, from his mother's womb, expert in inventing idols.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

We can't solve any problem without first solving the problem of human nature

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Human beings, as far as I can tell, seem to be divided into two subspecies -- the resigned, who live in quiet desperation, and the exhausted, who exist in restless agitation.

Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.