Irvine Welsh Quotes

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

Circumstances cause us to act the way we do. We should always bear this in mind before judging the actions of others. I realized this from the start during World War II.

No matter how bad the individual, everybody has reasons for why they do what they do.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.

By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Circumstances alter faces.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

Once you realize something, then you can't pretend you don't know it any more.

There are some lies that, under the right circumstances, are the only truth

Not even the Washington Post understands humanity.

Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean. We don’t even realize that they’re just theories.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.

One can only define the unknown by its supposed and supposable relations with the known.

If you give people more perspective of one object, they start to see it more clearly.

All men are children, and if you understand that, a woman understands everything.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

There is truth in all things, if you understand them well.

Knowledge is like fire 'cause it breaks down things so you can see what they truly are. It's like how a fire breaks your body down to carbon.