He is like everyone else, a compound of strange and inexplicable contrasts, and this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. But people are not like that. There may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour (Wednesday 7 December 1853).

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different.

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

"Everyone is a mass of contradictions. There are no "types" of people,"

We are not meant to be just like anyone else.

None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.

You know, we have pieces of the people that have cared about us all through our lives, and they're all part of us know. And so we represent, each one of us represents, so many investments from others. No one of us is alone.

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?

The problem is that we don't believe that we are much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.

Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!