Quotes on People

No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both.

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

I loved when Bush came out and said, 'We are losing the war against drugs.' You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.

Intelligent people discuss ideas. Fools discuss how people should behave.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .

You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled , what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and--well, we iron things out together, that's all.

Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; it's psychological.

I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

To reap a return in ten years, plant trees. To reap a return in 100, cultivate the people.

Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.

Love is not a thing, it is not lost when given. You can offer your love completely to hundreds of people and still retain the same love you had originally.