George Saunders Quotes

When I write, my goal is to delve deeply enough into the human experience to find a sort of universality. Once you dig down underneath surface differences, we are all human beings. And all human beings want essentially the same things at our core. We want to love and be loved. We want to be safe. We want our loved ones to be safe.

For me, there is only love and fear.

There are realities we all share, regardless of our nationality, language, or individual tastes. As we need food, so do we need emotional nourishment: love, kindness, appreciation, and support from others.

We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

Feeling angry is a universal human phenomenon. It is as basic as feeling hungry, lonely, loving, or tired. The capacity to feel angry and to respond in some way to that feeling is in us from birth.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

The body needs food, warmth and water, but your heart needs more.

I think 'The Hunger Games' has a really powerful message about survival, and sacrificing for the ones you love. It's almost like a warning for us to not lose touch of our humanity. We live in a world in which we watch other's misfortunes for entertainment.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.

There's always a common attraction to universal needs of love and a feeling of worthiness.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.

I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.

Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present. Fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

Ultimately, there are only two emotions: love and fear. And pretty much anything else you want to name can be broken down into one of those.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

Human beings need to feel that they are lovable and capable of loving.

There are some concerns that are universal. Everyone wants to be loved, and everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere in the world. Everyone wants to do something and feel like they have a sense of purpose. These are just the things that I think about and the things that make their way into my songwriting.

Jealousy, greed, fear. We're all full of these things. But also love and compassion. If you saw a drowning baby, it wouldn't matter if you were wearing a tuxedo on the way to your own wedding. You'd jump in to save him.

How do you motivate a human being to do things against his own nature? There's two things: love and fear. And to me, love wins every time.