Guy de Maupassant Quotes

Human beings, from their own point of view, are very different than what people see.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

Coming to terms with our true natures and who we really are has always been a fascination to humans. I know it fascinates me.

Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

I think in Mrs. C, I certainly played myself. A very compulsive, sweet person.

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.

The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?

Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.

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

I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.

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

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

I think you have to see the high highs and the low lows to get to the core of what makes us tick as people.

I'm not what I make.

I think, personally, it's our flaws that define us to us - or maybe it's just me.

We get older, and we get more wrinkles, but fundamentally, we stay the same... You have the same fears and doubts and concerns and dreams and passions and all those kinds of things, so I feel like you don't change as much as you think you do.

No one believes that they're a bad person at the end of the day.

It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

When you look in the mirror what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you?

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.