Joseph Conrad Quotes

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

When you're close to somebody, you can never really know how they're experiencing the world.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

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

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

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

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

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.

You never know where someone else is coming from. Even within best friendships or within mother- daughter relationships, you never fully know what's behind someone's eyes.

This may be a bit of a broad statement, but I don't think there's anyone that I've met that I haven't created a bit of a deep relationship with. It's a really lovely thing to create a relation with people that might not anticipate that closeness. And that's kind of the light of my life, getting to be close to people.

I don't think we ever know 100 percent of a person, even ourselves, but I think in families, you get closer to people's secrets and people's darkness - and their light, the full contrast of a person.

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.

She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.

Understanding of our fellow human beings...becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feelings in joy and sorrow.

I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

We wander through this life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the features of his neighbour. Only from time to time, through some experience that we have of our companion, or through some remark that he passes, he stands for a moment close to us, as though illuminated by a flash of lightning. Then we see him as he really is.

More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.

My theory is - we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there.

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

we all have too many wheels, screws and valves to judge each other on first impressions or one or two pointers. I don't understand you, you don't understand me and we don't understand ourselves.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.