A Quote by Graham Greene

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. — © Graham Greene
I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.
"Bhagavad Gita" is an examination of consciousness and the desire of human beings and the quest that we have as human beings to understand ourselves; that it was a map, you might say, for exploring the territory that leads us to find out things about ourselves.
A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.
Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.
I had to prove that I could understand other aspects of human beings and not just little fat girls.
I would hope that people might view their fellow beings, all beings, with more empathy, more compassion, with a desire to understand. Even if they can't know why people are the way they are, to understand that they're probably that way for a good reason.
If you're a human being, you can attempt to do what other human beings have done. We don't understand talent any more than we understand electricity.
This might be a controversial thing to suggest, but in a quest to understand and relate to terrorism or school shootings, sometimes it feels like it's real, the appeal. As we've seen with ISIS, it's not always the devout who are getting into it; it's just people looking for a sense of belonging. The more they feel they're up against, the more intensity the cause has. It's an epic clash of cultures, and both sides are playing that up, but it's human beings disaffected, detached, and lonely.
Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives
What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.
Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.
The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.
Take a good long look at human beings in their actual practices and motives; bring the utmost psychological and bio-economic factors to bear on making sense of their illusions and delusions. What then would the truth have to be, such that such human beings are FIT TO KNOW IT at all, even provisionally or tentatively?
Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
I believe that people want the scent of love, more than anything else. And I don't mean sentimentality, I don't mean mush. I mean that idea, that human beings are more alike than we are different. And that means that I can love you. I don't mean support you in bad things you do, that I can understand because you're a human being.
I wish I was harder; I wish I didn't care so much about being the nice girl all the time because a lot of the time people can take kindness for weakness, so I wish I had a little bit more 'oomph' in me.
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