“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”
Carol Plum-Ucci (1957) American writer
Source: What Happened to Lani Garver
“You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.”
Criterion Collection essay on Rashamon, excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography as translated by Audie E. Bock (1982) http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/196-akira-kurosawa-on-rashomon <br class="br">Context: Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings — the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.
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Akira Kurosawa16
Japanese film maker 1910–1998Related quotes
Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary
Sun-Faced Buddha, Moon-Faced Buddha lecture at the Zen Mountain Center (17 August 1971) http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/archives/index.cgi/710817V.html <br class="br">Context: Communication is — start by understanding — your own understanding about people. Even though you want them to understand you, you know, it is — unless you understand people, it is almost impossible. Don't you think so? Only when you understand people, they may understand you. So even though you do not say anything, if you understand people there is some communication.
Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1951) physicist
As quoted in: J.Muller, Physical Chemistry in Depth (Springer Science & Business Media, 1992), p. 1. No primary source is given in that book.
Disputed
“An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet”
Matt Haig (1975) British writer
Source: A Boy Called Christmas
M. K. Hobson (1969) American writer
“And what’s that?” Emily said softly.
“That love is not enough. But it’s a start.”
Source: The Hidden Goddess (2011), Chapter 19, “The Ruined Woman” (p. 291)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer
Autobiographical sketch (1970), at Nobelprize.org http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-autobio.html
Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter
A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free.
Lyrics, From a Basement on the Hill (posthumous, 2004)
Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist
Spacetime Tsunami http://www.deoxy.org/t_sunami.htm, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10. <br class="br">Context: I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.