Orson Scott Card Quotes

Every 10 years, I know less about love and relationships. The smarter I get, the less I know.

It's very hard to predict what people are thinking.

I don't always understand other people's motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don't mind. I don't always understand other people's motives.

We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we 'understand.' Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

I'm into people's emotional lives and relationships and the complications of living. That's my turf.

I majored in psychology, and I still love listening to people's problems.

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.

You've got to understand what makes the character human.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

One of the uncertain pleasures of adulthood, for me, has really been about confronting how little I know about the world and how much completely baffles me about the world and human behavior.

The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

It is extremely ironic that the more we care about what people think about us the less we care about people, and the less we care about what people think about us the more we begin to care for others

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

I think you realize how much you need to have people that you love. It's not as much about them loving you - it's about you needing to love people.

I got to thinking—when it was too late—you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don't care enough, you forget about them, if you can.

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

The one thing I've found is that someone always knows more than you do, including your babies. There are loads of things people presume I know about that I don't.

I think I'm really lucky that the things I'm able to love - people, animals - it's like the more you put yourself into it, the more you get out of it.

I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment.

Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don't know a damn thing.

People don't change just because you know more about them.