Charles Cumming Quotes

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

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

I think, when I meet a person, in general, it's not my habit to conclude anything about people. Not completely. Even people you know well constantly remain open.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.

I'm very interested in people, in general.

He's very nice. He's something I replied. She considered this zipping her purse shut. Then she said Well everyone is. Everyone is Something. For some reason that stuck with me simple and yet not every since she'd said it. It was like a puzzle as well two vague words with one clear one between them.

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.

Human beings are strange creatures. As people come across one another they produce various outcomes. Good things, sometimes. And other times, bad.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can.

There's no map to human behaviour.

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

I love, I love human beings, studying them.

I'm just totally fascinated by people.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

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.

I'm just incredibly interested in people.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.