Timothy Spall Quotes

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

A feeling is not a fact.

It's impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

What I really love about philosophers and psychologists is that they sound smart.

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.

Human beings are very complex creatures. This desire, this greed, this love is very complex.

Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.

Anybody who dedicates himself to exploring the human condition, there's always a detached eye that's watching. In any situation, a little part of me is observing it, to see if there are any raw materials to create something else later.

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Out: Reading is fundamental. In: Feeling is fundamental.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

When people show you who they are, believe them. I carry that with me a lot. It has served me well.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.