William Bernbach Quotes

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Do not make Mistakes about Character. That is the worst and yet easiest error. Better be cheated in the price than in the quality of goods. In dealing with men, more than with other things, it is necessary to look within. To know men is different from knowing things. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

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

I do this because I'm an observer of people. That's why I want to be an actor. I'm fascinated by human beings and the circumstances they find themselves in.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

Those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights.

The more experience and insight I obtain into human nature, the more convinced do I become that the greater portion of a man is purely animal.

I've always like sort of, as an actor, I'm drawn to exploring how we are as human beings in given situations and how we act and how we react and what makes us tick.

I know little about nature and hardly anything about men.

I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

I am very interest in the human condition. That is what I love about acting. I like studying different people and their psychosis. I like discovering what makes them tick. I always find that with any character I play. I need to find out what makes them tick.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

Of all human foibles love of living is the most powerful.

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.

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.