Admirable People Quotes & Sayings

He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world; to fight it back from himself and from those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given the strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness. — Laura Florand

Kusanagi had met plenty of good, admirable people who'd been turned into murderers by circumstance. There was something about them he always seemed to sense, an aura that they shared. Somehow, their transgression freed them from the confines of a mortal existence, allowing them to perceive the great truths of the universe. At the same time, it meant they had one foot in forbidden territory. They straddled the line between sanity and madness. — Keigo Higashino

There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people. — Mitch Kapor

To me there is nothing so admirable as a passionate love-bond between two human begins. Sam loves Frodo and wants to protect him and Frodo is extremely protective of Sam. So what you have are these two people locked into this journey together. They don't need to explain what they are to each other, they don't need to talk about it; they just are. — Sean Astin

I've been offered nymphomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, homicidal maniacs and just plain maniacs. I think producers felt that after playing a long series of noble and admirable characters there would be quite a lot of shock value in seeing me play something altogether different. But I prefer upbeat stories that send people out of the theater feeling better than they did coming in. It's my cup of tea. — Greer Garson

People who devote themselves to a life of style are admirable. — Zac Posen

Thanks for not pulling out Diplomatic Felix," Becky whispered. "You're showing admirable restraint. They really are very nice people. The more sane ones are being polite and giving you space while the others . . . Well, they're just . . . they're . . . we're not used to . . . if Tom Selleck showed up here, I'd probably make a complete idiot out of myself."

myself."

"And why didn't meeting me cause the same effect?"

"Come on, sweetie. You're great and all, but you're no Tom Sell-eck."

"What does he do? He smiles with dimples and grows a mustache."

Becky patted his arm consolingly. "Someday you'll be able to grow a mustache too. Just give it time. — Shannon Hale

Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever. — Florence King

Jazz is really about the human experience. It's about the ability of human beings to take the worst of circumstances and struggles and turn it into something creative and constructive. That's something that's built into the fiber of every human being. And I think that's why people can respond to it. They feel the freedom in it. And the attributes of jazz are also admirable. It's about dialogue. It's about sharing. And teamwork. It's in the moment, and it's nonjudgmental. — Herbie Hancock

NDCC is an admirable job of amassing information to prove that communism is socialism and socialism (a plot to enslave the world) is not a movement of the downtrodden but a scheme supported and directed by the wealthiest of people. If enough Americans read and act upon NDCC, they really can save the Republic from the conspirators
whose plans for the destruction of our country are galloping fast toward completion. — Dan Smoot

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced - in a word, insane. — Frank Herbert

If a leader demonstrates competency, genuine concern for others, and admirable character, people will follow. — Richard Chase

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife ... — Homer

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality. — Walter Jon Williams

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself. — William Martin

You seem to like helping, taking care of people," he said. "That is admirable."
"You enjoy being nurtured?"
"Well, that isn't all you promise. When you touch me, I feel a fire at my center. You want me to grow and find my true story, my purpose. You seem to want to be there when I see new things. You want to share and enjoy my discoveries. — Greg Bear

We only want to link up with people whom we like, admire, and trust ... We do not wish to join with managers who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a good deal with a bad person. — Warren Buffett

I know that throughout their history, the people of the United States defended their freedom, their liberty, their justice, and their rights - if need be - with their lives. I think their courage is so admirable. — Lee Myung-bak

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. — David Foster Wallace

The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises. — Nick Harkaway

Judi Dench has always been the benchmark for me. Everything I have seen her do is incredible. I also really admire Cate Blanchett. In terms of people I have worked with, there is no one more admirable than Hugh Jackman, for his spirit, energy, generosity and hard work. — Laura Donnelly

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around. — David Graeber

I always think it's far more admirable to confuse people than it is to reassure them. — Will Sheff

Am I corrupted if I believe that the people who think alike are more admirable and estimable than those who think for themselves? If no one thought differently, then where would our innovations come from? How would we ever advance beyond the status quo? Corruption isn't just moral or ethical in nature
rust is a form of corruption, one that eats away at its host like a parasite, constantly making it less than it was the day before. The belief that they should hold in greater esteem those who think alike is a form of rust, something that doesn't allow our young people to grow beyond the limitations already established by those who do think alike. — Tom Walsh

Makes sense to me. Sometimes starting over is exactly what a person needs. And I think it's admirable. A lot of people don't have the courage it takes to do something like that. — Nicholas Sparks

People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other. — Bertrand Russell

What we are told of the inhabitants of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to the tranquility and serenity of their climate; I rather attribute it to the tranquility and serenity of their souls, which are free from all passion, thought, or any absorbing and unpleasant labors. Those people spend their lives in an admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without any manner of religion. — Michel De Montaigne

There are good intentions behind many people's conversion to veganism, including an admirable devotion to the well-being of animals and a justified skepticism about the crap the USDA allows manufacturers to put in our food. But it's hard to ignore the often sanctimonious nature of what some nutritionists view as an 'extremist' way of eating. — Julie Klausner

There is nothing admirable about being obedient to a system that doesn't serve you. The present system we endure day in, day out is designed to turn us against each other while a minority of people get rich off our backs, destroying the planet in the process. — Rupert Dreyfus

In this statement, my Scipio, I build on your own admirable definition, that there can be no community, properly so called, unless it be regulated by a combination of rights. And by this definition it appears that a multitude of men may be just as tyrannical as a single despot and indeed this is the most odious of all tyrannies, since no monster can be more barbarous than the mob, which assumes the name and mask of the people. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals. — Jonathan Sacks

The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people. — Jacques Maritain

I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in. — Bertrand Russell

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? — Aldous Huxley

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy. — Bertrand Russell

No two people take on the information of being admirable and being admired in the same way. — Jock Sturges

It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution. — Marilynne Robinson

It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans. — John Brunner

All people, he thought with a sigh as he left the room, had their own demons to be fought - or not fought. Perhaps that was what life was all about. Perhaps life was a test to see how well we deal with our own particular demons, and how much sympathy we show others as they tread their own particular path through life.
You do not still hate her?" she asked as he moved her off to the side of the path for an open carriage that was coming toward them. "It is not easy to hate," he said, "when one has lived long enough to know that everyone has a difficult path to walk through life and does not always make wise or admirable choices. There are very few out-and-out villains, perhaps none. Though there are a few who come very close. — Mary Balogh

People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me. — Helen Hayes

Many people inside the church think God cares only that we obey. In fact, many believe that it is even more honorable
and therefore more righteous
when we obey God against all desire to obey Him. Where did we get the idea that if we do what God tells us to do, even though 'our hearts are far from Him,' it's something to be proud of, something admirable, something praiseworthy, something righteous? Don't get me wrong, we should obey when we don't feel like it. But lets not make the common mistake of proudly equating that with the righteousness that God requires. — Tullian Tchividjian

He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal — Hanya Yanagihara

There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends. — Homer

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging into. — David Foster Wallace

Rayner, I estimated, was ten years older than me. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with that. I have good, warm, non-arm-breaking relationships with plenty of people who are ten years older than me. People who are ten years older than me are, by and large, admirable. But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent. — Hugh Laurie

Perfectly prepared to be an eavesdropper but unwilling to look like one, Philippa backed quickly towards the door and collided, hard, with an unseen person striding forward equally fast into the room. There was a hiss, more than echoed by herself as the breath was struck from her body. Then two cool, friendly hands held and steadied her, one on her shoulder and one on her flat waist, and a low voice said, 'Admirable Philippa. I always enter my battlefields in reverse, too. But my own battlefields, my little friend. Not other people's. — Dorothy Dunnett

Tis admirable to consider, how Powerful the Kings are, yet they move by the Breath of their People. — William Penn

What is pure Bill? Or excellent or admirable? The death of a million people in a flood? God evidently through so. He is incapable of acts that are not admirable, and it is He who brought about the Flood. How about the slaying of children in Jericho? There are a few Bible stories that are not as terrible as they are happy. We just prefer to leave out the terrible part, but that only makes the good anemic. — Ted Dekker

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies. — Nick Hornby

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. — Diane Setterfield

I know most people want others to have good lives, and, when they understand the situation, they will do what they can to steer the world back toward kindness. This is when human beings, I believe, are most admirable. — Daoud Hari

My dear fellow " Said Albert, turning to Franz " here is an admirable adventure; we will fill our carriage with pistols, blunderbusses, and double-barreled shotguns. Luigi Vampa comes to take us, and we take him - we bring him back to Rome , and present him to him holiness the Pope, who asks how he can repay so great a service; Then we merely ask for a cariage and a pair of horses, and we will see the Carnival in the carriage , and doubtless the Roman people will crown us at the capitol , and proclaim us, like Curtius and the veiled Horatius, the preservers of there country."
Whilst Albert proposed this scheme, signor Pastrini's face assumed an expression impossible to describe. — Alexandre Dumas

He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper," "spiritual" world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea - the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction... and that to cease to do so would be "priggish," "intolerant," and... "Puritanical. — C.S. Lewis

Everyone has the capacity for courage. We don't need to face extreme circumstances to become admirable people. — Mariane Pearl

Vuillard balances too far on the side of fantasy ... the people in his pictures are not properly defined. As he's an admirable draughtsman it must be that he just doesn't want to give them mouths and hands and feet. — Paul Signac

As to sagacity, I should say that his judgement respecting the warmest place and the softest cushion in a room is infallible, his punctuality at meal times is admirable, and his pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders till they give him some of the best of what is going, indicates great firmness. — Thomas Huxley

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable. For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man. — Primo Levi

So many shows out there dumb-down the country. It's so admirable to be part of a show that wants people to think. — David Krumholtz

Craziness is only a matter of degree, and there are lots of people besides me who have the urge to roll heads. They go to stock-car races and the horror movies and the wrestling matches they have in Portland Expo. Maybe what she said smacked of all those things, but I admired her for saying out loud, all the same
the price of honesty is always high. She had an admirable grasp of the fundamentals. Besides, she was tiny and pretty. — Richard Bachman

There are so many things admirable people do not understand. — William Stafford

Bad as "independence" is, the main fault of the Federal Reserve System - an admirable system if conducted in the public interest - is that too much power and control rests in the hands of people whose private interests are directly affected by the Federal Reserves' actions. — Wright Patman

He'd solved the problem you see - and that's the way some people are. They are ceaselessly finding ways of getting to grips with the world, of surmounting certain antipathies so as to apply themselves to it that little bit more. It's quite admirable really, how they refuse to let anything come between them and the rest of it - Oh, the rest of it! Sort of there, sort of hovering there all the time. Different ideas come to me now and again - strategies I suppose that might inculcate a little more compatibility. I just don't know if I'll ever get the hang of it if you want to know - as a matter of fact I think I've left it a little too late to cultivate the necessary outlook. — Claire-Louise Bennett

I'd say that all nations have contact with the truth, and all religions have admirable people. — Jon Voight

The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. — Donna Tartt

The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third - most important - a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes. — Leo Tolstoy

As we grow older, we should learn that these are two quite different things. Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters. We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable. — Sydney J. Harris

A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in. — Anita Brookner

People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want
to vomit - and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre

I really enjoy working with people who have come into this industry for what I think are really admirable reasons. People who really want to tell brilliant stories and do it in the most effective way possible. — Emily Berrington

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought ... I thought ... maybe, one day, I could be one of them. — Michael Palin

Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I knew, who would never say 'the weather grew cold,' but that 'winter begins to salute us.' I have no patience for such coxcombs ... — Dorothy Osborne

His deepest need was that people should like him. An admirable trait that; in a spaniel. Or a whore. — Michael Dobbs

In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world.

Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture.
Imagine all kinds of people everywhere
getting committed to human excellence,
getting committed to closing the gap
between the human condition
and the human potential...
And imagine all of us hooked up
with a common high tech communications system.
That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes.
Human excellence is an ideal
that we can embed
into every formal human structure
on our planet.
And that's really why we're going to do this.
And that's also why
The Meta Network is a creation
we can love.

Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable. — Jon Ronson

Americans were people who wanted to leave every place better than they found it, to leave every man more of a man than they found him ... Americans could open doors to almost all that was admirable - it was their misfortune, not their fault, that movies and victrolas and advertisements squeezed in when they opened the door. — Stella Benson

But he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones that you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams? — Brian Doyle

Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William Blake
This admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist. — David Cecil

Maybe you cannot be the CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or steal from them, or - maybe best of all - create situations that cause them to feel bad about themselves. And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are superior to you in some way. Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only good fun; it is existential vengeance. And without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss's boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker's project, or gaslight a patient (or a child), bait people with promises, or provide a little misinformation that will never be traced back to you. — Martha Stout

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. — Virginia Woolf

It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat. — J.M. Coetzee

I don't believe in respecting women on the grounds that they are women. What's important is not DISRESPECTING them. In my eyes, everyone starts off as a person, what the individual does defines them, regardless of color, race, creed, sexual preference or gender. People need to stop demanding respect. Do something respectable. Yes, the majority of men do play games with women and treat them like machines that if you oil the right way you'll get what you want out of them, and that sucks, but at the same time, as many women act and behave like those very machines. The most admirable thing, I find in my lifetime at least, is just being yourself. It's also the hardest thing to do. — Max Davine

At the heart of every successful romance novel lies the evolution of its characters. Through love, heroes and heroines grow not only into a perfect match, but into stronger, better, more admirable people. — Sarah MacLean

The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. — Flannery O'Connor

It is admirable to consider how many millions of people come into, and go out of the world, ignorant of themselves and of the world they have lived in. — William Penn

I've known several men who believe women are only interested in relationships for money and comfort, and they aren't capable of really loving. And I've known women who insist men only want sex and don't know how to love. White people used to insist that blacks weren't capable of 'noble' emotions, that they were little more than animals. The same was said about Jews, Native Americans, you name it. It's an ancient argument. People keep dredging it up, trying to prove to themselves that people they don't understand are alien and don't warrant being treated well. And it is always - always - wrong. Despite our differences, all people are basically built from the same template. We are all equally admirable and equally flawed. — Jamie Fessenden

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting.
Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu ... — W. Somerset Maugham

He had always seen his self-sufficiency as an admirable quality, a way of not imposing upon other people, but he could see now that it was an insult to those close to you. — Mark Haddon