Andre Gide Quotes

We are all disposed to attribute to other's motives and views that we have entertained ourselves.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.

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

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

This kind of charge reveals a good deal about the personality of the people who make it; to impute such motives to another man is to imply you're harboring them yourself.

I'm good at reading people.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

One of the many joys of being an actor is to understand the human psychology.

With women, you always have to make an educated decision to figure out what they're thinking. It's not one that's necessarily sympathetic, always. Of course, we're all human beings, but the gender thing is big thing. And a great thing.

You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?

The important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but what the voices are feeling.

It's a sad comment on humans that none of them are tolerable to one who can read their minds

All mankind's inner feelings eventually manifest themselves as an outer reality.

To get a person's real opinion, ask what she thinks everyone else believes... If people truly hold a particular belief, they are more likely to think that others agree or have had similar experiences. [People] tend to assume that other people have had life histories at least somewhat similar to their own. When we talk about other people, we are often talking about ourselves, whether we know it ourselves.

I do find it sometimes that people project their own feelings on to the characters and I think that there is a certain amount of sexism - I mean the proprietary nature, for men and women.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.

To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

The ability to understand people is one of the greatest assets anyone can ever have.

We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.

I love to kind of people watch; that's part of what I do as an actor and creative person and sort of step back and watch others.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.