Marshall McLuhan Quotes

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Any human being is this wonderful conglomeration of experiences and behaviors, if you like - some of them healthy, some of them not so healthy.

Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

A man may make a misanthrope of himself, but he is never one by nature.

From an egotistical point of view, I'm always interested in roles that push me as a person. I'm interested in humans as animals and as products of society.

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.

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal.

All of us have a bit of a sociopath inside of us, and it's wrong to think that somebody is just clearly sociopathic, because they're not. It's interesting to explore the shadings and nuances within a person. Those feelings exist within more human beings than people may want to acknowledge.

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

As a human being, I'm work in process.

What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don't think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you've done up to now.

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul.

We only half live when we only half think

What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?

Although men are accused of not knowing their weakness, yet perhaps as few know their strength.

Who you are and what you think of yourself is constantly changing.