We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.
Luigi PirandelloRead
Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between human emotions and rational thought.
Pirandello's quote illustrates the dichotomy between logical reasoning and the complexities of human emotions. It suggests that while one can logically analyze a situation and devise a solution, one's deeper emotional desires may conflict with that rational conclusion, leading to a sense of ambivalence or hope against the expected logical outcome.
In practice
During a debate on ethics, one could use this quote to illustrate the tension between rational policies and human feelings.
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.
Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!
THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
A fact is like a sack - it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.
Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.
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