human nature

Arendt saw that in her time, too. “Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Arthur Schopenhauer in his aptly titled Studies in Pessimism: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

Did she model the Alysha beneath the masks and façades that every one of us wears, or did she model the masks too, the person Alysha tried to be whenever anyone was watching? Even the cracksman who’d made her hadn’t been able to give a certain answer to that. A mixture of the two, he’d said. The person she presented to the world, the parts she want

“I detest mysteries. I would never bring one into my home.” “Well, you have, in me.” I blushed, I think, from head to toe. “That’s different,” I stammered. “Human lives exist to be experienced, or possibly endured, but not solved. They resemble any other novel more than they do mysteries. Westerns, even. It’s that lie the mystery tells that I detes

I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin? If so, jealousy is mine and it’s tempting to read this sad consistency as a matter of character. But my father, were he still alive, would surely protest. Who did I think I was?

Those old women know just how to sit on the mountain-top and watch the tigers fight; how to murder with a borrowed knife, or help the wind to fan the fire. They will look on safely from the bank while you are drowning in the river.

like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

he would really have given up any thing, which he had not been very much tempted to do.

as Wanda says in BoJackHorseman, “when you look at someone through rose-tinted glasses, all the red flags just look like flags”.

No man was there but must have some inkling now of what had happened last night in Tintagel, and of the part I had played in bringing the King to his heart’s desire. It was possible that the simpler souls among the King’s companions might have expected the King to be grateful; to reward me; at the very least to recognise and acknowledge me. But I,