Francois Rene de Chateaubriand Quotes

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

The human heart is a dark forest.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Everyone is complicated one way or another. But it's interesting to dig into a complicated character, to try to find that within yourself.

What interests me are the complexities and contradictions and struggles and joys of messy human beings.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

I like exploring both the light parts and the dark parts of a single person. And all of those shades tend to come out most acutely in stories about families.

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

I think people have a lot of layers. I know I do in particular.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

I have never known a greater miracle, or monster, than myself.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth - that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine.

I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.