Jean Paul Quotes

Love and hate have a magical transforming power. They are the great soul changers. We grow through their exercise into the likeness of what we contemplate.

For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

There's a lot of me in it. But the character is more egotistical. I'm also egotistical, but not the way the character is. This guy is successful, he has everything, but his wife has left him. The most important value - love - is missing. What is wrong with this institution called 'marriage'? What is wrong with this institution called 'the pursuit of happiness'?

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.

I love playing a role where I think I'm right and then you learn you're not.

Pippin chooses love and finds a greater sense of himself at the end of all the madness. I relate to him in many ways. I have been through stuff, thought I knew best, and often been proven wrong.

I would like to think that I'm more different from my character than I am.

Acting for me is finding those things that, finding the strings of humanity that tie us all together. And you only find that by living life and loving and breaking up.

I used to be in my own world and keep to myself all the time, so there may have been a perception about my reserved demeanour that was misconstrued as arrogance. But when people interact with you, then they know the real you.

I wasn't always this introverted.

I love playing a role where I think I'm right and then you learn you're not. And it's what you do with that information.

You know, I have some issues. But I just love to play different characters all the time, and I try not to repeat myself too much.

Exposing characters and their shortcomings gives me great comfort. It's always great to write about someone more mixed up than yourself.

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

When you love and accept yourself, when you know who really cares about you, and when you learn from your mistakes, then you stop caring about what people who don't know you think.

I'm just mystified and fascinated by women, and I'm still single. Hence all of that, and the fact that I celebrate them so much, I understand that I'm unevolved at this exact moment to share my life with one. I wouldn't inflict that upon anyone yet. But, I'm getting closer.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

I'm really fascinated by the self and how our selves shift and change over time and in relationship to different people.

Be as you wish to seem.

I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.

It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.

We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

You don't realize how much a part of your character is part of yourself until you are no longer playing that character.