Frederick Locker-Lampson Quotes

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

Humanity has both its beautiful and its ugly sides.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Man is a paradoxical being - the constant glory and scandal of this world.

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous.

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

Beautiful. And ugly. The world is always both.

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

Surely life has taught you that a thing can be both beautiful and vile.

I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

Life is such a tragicomedy.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.

All the things that I find beautiful have a darkness about them.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.

That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.