Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside mean — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house."
"I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal."
"Enforcement priorities developed by my administration are not affected by this ruling. This means that the people who might have benefited from the expanded deferred action policies, long-term residents raising children who are Americans or legal residents, they will remain low priorities for enforcement, as long as you have not committed a crime, our limited immigration enforcement resources are not focused on you."
"I mean, if you think about - if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It's the Post Office that's always having problems."
"When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality."
"To do everything in a sacred manner means to do everything fully in the state of presence."
"Learning something means coming into contact with a world of which you know nothing. In order to learn, you must be humble."
"Life sometimes separates people so that they can realize how much they mean to each other."
"By the study of their biographies, we receive each man as a guest into our minds, and we seem to understand their character as the result of a personal acquaintance, because we have obtained from their acts the best and most important means of forming an opinion about them. "What greater pleasure could'st thou gain than this?" What more valuable for the elevation of our own character?"
"Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated."
"A lot of people probably think I'm not athletic or don't even try to work out or whatever, but I do. Just because you're big doesn't mean you can't be an athlete. And just because you work out doesn't mean you're going to have a 12-pack. I work out to make sure I can do my job to the best of my ability. Other than that, I'm not going up there trying to be a fitness model."
"And when I say equality, I mean equality for everybody. Who are you telling who they can marry and who they can’t? What is this? This is 2014."
"Change means the unknown."
"The Tibetan religion has a past. And furthermore it has such an appeal. There again young people today are drawn to Buddhism and to Tibet. It's not only because of the Dalai Lama. It's because of what Tibet represents. There is a vast reservoir of knowledge, of mystical knowledge, which can be found in Tibet.The Chinese shouldn't be afraid of that really. They have other means of survival."
"An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but an ignorance of aims make it impossible to be great at all."
"The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond."
"I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I don't know, general friendliness and willingness to please, just to point out two."
"Freedom does not mean license."
"What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal."
"Death is by no means separate from life. . . . We all interact with death every day, tasting it as we might a wine, feeling its keen edge even in trifling losses and disappointments, holding it by the hand, as a dancer might a partner, in every separation."
