Virginia Woolf Quotes

How can one know anything at all about people?

The reason I act is because I'm trying to understand why people are as they are.

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

I tell you I can't read a book, but I can read de people.

Psychology is simply great because it helps you better understand all kinds of people.

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

As designers, we are the interface. Trying to make things understandable. That requires involving oneself with what's going on in the world. One must understand what people are, what they're up to, what they care about, how they feel.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.

Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?

There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let penetrating eye at once into a man's soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, --or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

And usually I'm not watching the screen. I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to' cause it's - as Joe Ranft used to say, you know, animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

Rose: You have a gift Jack, you do. You see people. Jack: I see you. Rose: And? Jack: You wouldn't have jumped.

But the extraordinary insight which some persons are able to gain of others from indications so slight that it is difficult to ascertain what they are, is certainly rendered more comprehensible by the view here taken.

When you try to help people become a better person, you're going to have to find out what's really going in their world.

The reason people don't know what is good for them is because most people don't know what they are trying to do.

You can never predict what little things in the way somebody looks or talks or acts will set off peculiar emotional reactions in other people.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.

A part of being an actor is I people watch. I like to observe their behaviour, watch their reactions on the street and see how they talk to each other, and that's impossible when they are looking back at you. I used to enjoy taking the train and watching people in their own minds, struggling with themselves.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding

The eye is the inlet to the soul, and it is well to beware of him whose visual organs avoid your honest regard.