Philipp Meyer Quotes

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

And that's what art is, a form in which people can reflect on who we are as human beings and come to some understanding of this journey we are on.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

My fascination is not for cinema; it's for human nature and human beings because I find it quite difficult being one at times.

My primary interest has always been about exploring the human psyche and humanity.

I think all of the secrets of the universe are revealed in history. We understand who we are by understanding where we've been and why we are the way we are, and where we come from.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

I think we present extreme aspects of human behavior and hopefully get at times, messages across or bring issues to the table or as we so often say, shed light into the dark crevices of human nature.

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

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.

At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing, and I'm also open to the fact that maybe it's just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.

Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.

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.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I spent my entire childhood observing people. I still do.

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

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.