Tom Hiddleston quotes:

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.

Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you're playing a tender love story that's set in a coffee shop or whether you're in 'The Avengers,' which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.

Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.

I grew up watching 'Superman.' As a child, when I first learned to dive into a swimming pool, I wasn't diving, I was flying, like Superman. I used to dream of rescuing a girl I had a crush on from a playground bully.

The thing about playing gods, whether you're playing Thor and Loki or Greco Roman gods or Indian gods or characters in any mythology, the reason that gods were invented was because they were basically larger versions of ourselves.

My favourite pudding is a toss-up between cheesecake - proper, New York cheesecake - and apple crumble and custard. Custard is very important, or dark chocolate mousse. Tea: probably Earl Grey, splash of milk.

Heath Ledger's performance in 'The Dark Knight' quite simply changed the game. He raised the bar not just for actors in superhero films, but young actors everywhere; for me. His performance was dark, anarchic, dizzying, free, and totally, thrillingly, dangerous.

Chris Hemsworth is like Christopher Reeve in that he can do two things: he can wear a big red cape without a shred of self-consciousness. But he's also funny as hell, and he's so sweet. So with all the fish-out-of-water stuff, he's so funny. So he does almost two jobs in a way.

I've done my share of period stuff. I'm not sure why, but people say I have a period face. The bread and butter of British TV is Jane Austen adaptations and bridges and bonnets and boats and horses.

Haters never win. I just think that's true about life, because negative energy always costs in the end.

I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City.

Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'

In 'Thor,' that was my own hair. I grew it out. But I have naturally curly, blonde hair, so I'll never look like that. By the time I got to 'The Avengers,' I had come off two other films, which required me to have it very short. So I dyed it again and it was long enough to use a part of my hairline.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.

For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.

You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.

Showing young children in these communities, that there are outlets for their feelings, that there is room in a space for their stories to be told, and that they will be applauded - and it's not about ego, it's about connection: that their pain is everybody else's pain.

I feel as though the cardboard box of my own reality has been flattened and blown open. Now I can see the edge of the world.

I couldn't possibly tell you. But I would say be very careful with your suppositions. People are so quick to jump. That's what I love about playing the character. People are so quick to draw conclusions about who he is. The whole thing about Loki is that he's dancing on this liminal line between redemption and destruction. Just be very careful about drawing conclusions based on what you see.

If you are at a boys' school, especially, there is a level of bravado that you have to keep up otherwise you'll get picked on.

I don't think anyone, until their soul leaves their body, is past the point of no return.

The best comedy is always played straight down the middle.

All acting is an act of imagination. You are simply conjuring up imaginary circumstances in your mind and responding truthfully to them.

Whenever I come back to London, which is home, I get that cosy, comfortable feeling of being home, as well as the sophistication of this city.

I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.

Daniel Day-Lewis is particularly a sort of beacon I've been following for some time. For God's sake, I'm not even in his league but he inspires me because he's not interested in playing himself; he's only interested in playing other people and the whole thing is like an adventure for him, it seems to me. It's some kind of spiritual exploration, which is an amazing, noble thing.

If you get up in the morning and wear a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and some flip-flops, it's a signal that you might be going to the beach. If you get up in the morning and you wear a breast plate and a back plate and a cape and a pair of golden Satanic horns on your head, it's quite clear that you're doing something else.

There are certain things in the scripts that need to be planned: you know, big stunt sequences, battle sequences... you can't improvise that stuff. You can improvise when there's just two of you standing in a kitchen and the most dramatic thing that's going to happen is someone's going to open the fridge.

What's my guilty pleasure? The thing is, I never feel guilty about pleasures.

The learning is the heavy lifting. You need to get the words into your brain.

It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good.

I don't think I've ever been face to face with pure evil, so I don't think I've ever seen it with my own eyes. But I do understand human frailty and I do understand the capacity of people to be intermittently noble and virtuous and fallible.

We're travelling through space and time, we're dealing with gods and monsters, but at the heart of the film, from my perspective, is a family - a father, two sons, two brothers, a mother and the fractious, intimate interaction that they have.

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

Tony Stark in 'Iron Man' helped wider audiences finally embrace the enormous talent of Robert Downey Jr.

Love your life. Because your life is what you have to give.

Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming.

Since my education, I've done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians - certainly when I was there - went to Cambridge. I don't know whether it's the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford, because it seemed more of an easy bridge.

I have a little office in my house and it is an absolute pigsty but I know exactly where everything is and there are little things stuck all over the walls, and papers in in-trays and files I have saved on my computer and playlists I have made on my iTunes - things that take me to a place that I think is appropriate,

I am an optimist... I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.

My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He's from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, 'You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You've been educated, so why do you want to spend your life pretending to be someone else when you could be your own man?'

Without revealing too much, there's a specific skill set you need to be in Loki's army - let me know if you have the qualifications.

I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.

I'd love to see T'he Avengers' with Robert Downey, Jr. playing Loki and Clark Gregg playing 'Thor' and I play Captain America.

The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.

Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.

You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.

I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.

Loki'd!

Also guys, it would be awesome if you could upvote the information I've added letting everyone know that some of these quotes are fake and aren't real or cool things to spread around. :) Thanks Hiddlestoners!! ^_^

Every villain is a hero in his own mind.

Every villian is a hero in his own mind.

The most interesting thing about being alive is that there is no black and white; there are many shades of gray.

Never, ever, let anyone tell you what you can and can't do. Prove the cynics wrong. Pity them for they have no imagination. The sky's the limit. Your sky. Your limit. Now. Let's dance.

Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don't.

As a child, I had a deck of Marvel top trumps. You can get top trumps with racing cars, or fighter planes, or football players... I had all of the Marvel superheroes and super-villains you could get, and I used to play them with my friends. They were all listed according to their height and weight and agility and their super-powers.

The thing that keeps you grounded is doing the thing you love.

I fundamentally believe that in the moral balance of the human race, we right ourselves. If we feel like the ship's keel is off, we find a way to steer ourselves through the storm repeatedly.

Acting takes a degree of mutual trust and respect.

The language of digital communication is a language we don't understand in a way. People say the internet is like the Wild West in that it's lawless and we haven't worked out how to make it structured or moral.

Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in 'Batman'; Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.

If the Loki in 'Thor' was about a spiritual confusion - 'Who am I? How do I belong in this world?' - the Loki in 'Avengers' is, 'I know exactly who I am, and I'm going to make this world belong to me.'

Actors do tend to get pigeonholed. People want to know who you are so they can put you in a box. It's lovely to be known for such diametrically opposite roles.

When people don't like themselves very much, they have to make up for it. The classic bully was actually a victim first.

I love the acting community at Cambridge. It's really quite committed and serious, since the days of Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen right through to Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

It's like playing tennis, you play a different rally with different people. Every actor is different and the chemistry between actors is different.

I was so lucky because what I did in 'Thor' was I built the character from the ground up - the foundations of his spirit, really. He was someone who was born with an expectation that he would one day be a king, born with an entitlement.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

Acting is a bit like tennis in that you can't really do it on your own.

America and Europe are so different in the way they conceive of themselves and art and cinema.

An ant has no quarrel with a boot.

As a citizen, you have a duty to ask what is true and what is false.

As an actor, it's much, much easier to be really nasty to someone that you really like.

At Christmas, individuals are apportioned their roles in the family script - you're either the funny one or the sensitive one; or you either do the cooking or the washing up. And those roles aren't easy to change.

Do the work, enjoy the work, take it seriously, don't take yourself seriously and keep your head down!

Don't judge people on who they used to be. Allow them to be who they are now.

Everybody is great and the chemistry is different with everyone. That is the joy of acting - you really don't know how it is going to go until you turn up. It's like playing tennis, you can't plan for the match you are going to play until you are actually up against your opponent and what happens, happens. That is the joy of being on set.

Everybody thinks that you go to Africa and you build a school, or you teach English, or you build a hospital. But actually all you need to do is play football with kids for six months and then after they've trusted you, you tell them about the truth of Aids, and that their grandmother didn't die from witchcraft, she died from Aids. And that's the biggest difference you can make.

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

Everywhere there is inequality, everywhere there is division, and I worry about it. I think everybody does.

Fame is weird and amorphous and unpredictable.

For the first 10 minutes after you meet them, they have the wattage and charisma of movie stars. Then you have a coffee with them and you realize we're all the same, we're all just people. All of the actors in The Avengers are so nice. Marvel has these code names for projects and the code name for The Avengers was Group Hug. It felt very much like a group hug on set.

Having seen what I've seen in South Sudan, there's no way I can't talk about it.

Honestly, I'm happiest when I'm with my best friend and we're just laughing about life and times, there is nothing greater than friendship in this world. And that kind of sort of mutual acceptance ; to feel known and understood by people and to feel like you know and understand them back is all you can ask for.

I always thought of running as just dancing forward.

I always wanted to see what America was like. I had that curiosity in my 20s when I was working in the theatre here [ in London]... there was the mystery of LA and I wondered what happened over there. I wanted to go and check it out and I'm pleased that I have.

I am desperate to do a comedy now.

I am no saviour. I'm absolutely the last person on the planet who can practically help. I don't know how to make the different types of therapeutic feeding milk. I'm no chemist. I'm no doctor. I'm no engineer. I can't manufacture polio vaccines or organise their transportation to the health centres in Saramoussayah or Bissikirima. I can't build schools, or design drainage systems. I can't provide the women and children of Mandiana with water.All I can do now is help make people aware of what is happening, of what they are doing. That is all that I can do. For now.

I am so profoundly aware of my lack of skill to make any material difference. I am not a doctor. I can't influence foreign policy. I can't build schools. I can't chemically engineer the protein paste that helps people with acute malnutrition. But I can talk about it, and so can you.

I believe in the strength and intelligence and sensitivity of women. My mother, my sisters [they] are strong. My mum is a strong woman and I love her for it.

I definitely go through periods where I'm in a particular mood, or there's a consistent imaginative context that I feel I'm in, and I'm drawn to certain things. I can sometimes feel it when I'm moving away from something that I was once interested in - an idea or an exploration of particular relationships. I go, 'Well, I think I've done that and I don't want to do it again.'

I do sort of believe that in life all manifestations of evil usually come from an emotional place. They come from some kind of emotional heartbreak or some psychological damage. I'm not a psychologist and that's probably for the best but I am interested in it.

I don't want to be quoted as 'Tom Hiddleston, psychologist says...' But there is a psychological aspect to being an actor. We are particular students of human nature - not every actor is, of course, but that's what fascinates me about being an actor.

I don't want to name names because I don't want to draw too many direct comparisons but the history of Fascism is populated by people who need to subjugate other people and elevate their status and power to a level which is supreme. Usually, any psychological study of those people will reveal a sort of lost, damaged child, who is somehow heartbroken and doesn't have any self-worth.

I even feel grateful for the failures.

I fear looking back and wishing I had done things I hadn't.

I feel so grateful to my mother and father for a happy childhood. There are things I now understand that they were able to give me that are very special.

I find that, when I'm working, if I start the day with a run - outside, not in a gym, but just me out there in the elements, with only my own legs to propel me forward... It's something to do with just being in the world and getting out of my own head.

I gave myself permission to care, because there are a lot of people in this world who are afraid of caring, who are afraid of showing they care because it's uncool. It's uncool to have passion. It's so much easier to lose when you've shown everyone how much you don't care if you win or lose. It's much harder to lose when you show that you care, but you'll never win unless you also stand to lose. I've said it before. Don't be afraid of your passion, give it free reign, and be honest and work hard and it will all turn out just fine.

I had huge fun with Chris Evans, as Captain America, because super-soldier though he may be, he's still a man, up against a God who in his own mind is infinitely superior. Then, in the ring with The Hulk, we've got this silver tongued, lightening quick mind up against the embodiment of rage..Loki has this mercurial, transformative ability, not just physically but intellectually, so not all the fights are purely physical. Mind games? Maybe..

I have been allowed to inhabit different shades of human nature and different colours of truth indifferent circumstances.

I learn the lines as soon as I can and then the challenge really, for filming, is to show up and be there and respond to what's around you. That's where the gold dust is. It's really strange, no amount of preparation will help you with the magic of spontaneity on the day [of filming].

I never get afraid of things, I only get excited.

I never like to make plans. It's nice to just hang.

I suppose my understanding of villains is that they're just people who are infected by all of the darker instincts - that they haven't got the discipline to make the right choices.

I think everyone should do what they love because it will never feel like work that way.

I think everyone should pursue their dreams. Whether you want to play football, act, sing, become a writer or whatever you have burning inside you as you're growing up, you should pursue it.

I THINK IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE CONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC YOU'VE GOT TO GO ALL THE WAY: A BEAUTIFUL DINNER SOMEWHERE LOVELY, WITH BOAT-LOADS OF FLOWERS, CHOCOLATES AND CHAMPAGNE. BUT IT MIGHT ALSO BE NICE TO WRAP UP WARM AND SIT ON A ROOF SOMEWHERE, WITH A CUP OF HOT SOUP AND YOUR GIRL, WATCH THE PLANES COME IN OVER LONDON AND LISTEN TO THE NIGHT.

I think that is so interesting. It is le Carré. There must be so much of him when he was younger. He's an interesting character. I don't want to say the word "passive" because there is something very active about the way he is passive, if that makes any sense: the nature of his watching and his listening is active. It is always so alive because he is, essentially, a spy.

I think the early years, the first decade of your life, is the most formative in a way.

I think when the world makes you feel rejected, you bite back.

I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans,

I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans. I'm going to keep the door open, and keep the page blank, and see what gets painted upon it.