Francesco Guicciardini Quotes

People are incredible creatures of habit.

Well, I mean, I'm very much a pragmatic person.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

I try to be a realist and not a pessimist or an optimist.

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.

People have to be realistic, or the dream just drags on.

There must be something wrong with those people who think Audrey Hepburn doesn’t perspire, hiccup or sneeze, because they know that’s not true. I n fact, I hiccup more than most.

People love high ideals, but they got to be about 33-percent plausible

Habits are more powerful than fears.

I'm very interested in people, so if a character happens to be real, there's that much more to look at.

If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.

The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.

To err is human; to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.

A role model is an imperfect person, not a perfect person, because that's who we are as real people.

Part of the reason I wrote the book was I wanted to understand for myself why such good people let themselves get treated so badly.

One study says that 90 percent of our everyday behavior is based on our habits. . . That means how we treat people, how we spend our money, what we watch, what we listen to - 90 percent of the time, we're on autopilot. We do what we've always done.

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

What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

Watch people do their most common actions; these are indeed the things that will tell you the real character of a great person.

I think we have every reason to hope for the best but expect and prepare for the worst.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]

There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see.

People in my neighborhood inspired me to sing. Believe in your ability no matter what, but be realistic with yourself and your ability.

We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.