David Hume Quotes

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

People only hate what they see in themselves.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn't inside us can't excite us.

You see in others who you are.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

This kind of charge reveals a good deal about the personality of the people who make it; to impute such motives to another man is to imply you're harboring them yourself.

Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.

In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.

I'm interested in the human more than I'm interested in building suspense.

Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.

A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.

You can only see in someone else what you see in yourself.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt - to me, anyway - is what makes you human, and without doubt, even the righteous lose their grip, not only on reality but also on their humanity.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

Saying 'I'm wrong' is meaningless unless it comes from our heart, not just our lips. That often requires a genuine and profound change within ourselves, because we need to realize it's simply human nature and that everyone makes mistakes.

The more defensive and angry I get, the more I later discover those feelings are usually just projections of feelings I am having towards myself.

When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.

Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.

I sometimes look into the face of my dog Stan and see a wistful sadness and existential angst, when all he is actually doing is slowly scanning the ceiling for flies.

Every time we focus on someone else's darkness, we are blocking our own view of the light. We think the person we are involved with has attacked us or has withheld love from us, when they really haven't. We focus on their guilt instead of their innocence. Frequently people are just being themselves and we start projecting our own childhood dramas onto them, pushing away the very love we want so much.

I do find it sometimes that people project their own feelings on to the characters and I think that there is a certain amount of sexism - I mean the proprietary nature, for men and women.

It is a fact that you project what you are.

The audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves.