Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

I am drawn to characters that go on journeys, characters that are real people, that have life.

My life is just my life. When you're living it, it's just normal.

I want to tell stories that are true and that resonate and move people, that highlight both the tremendous beauty and ugliness available in the human experience.

Human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God.

Do we not see all humans unaware Of what they want, and always searching everywhere, And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives? So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

I have no story. My story goes from day to day.

I don't think I've ever really pursued telling my story, but I think things come to you at the right time.

We are creatures of story.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

"Stories don't always have happy endings." This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.

I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .