Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I fear getting things wrong and messing up, and this makes no rational sense. When I'm mindful and awake, I know mistakes are part of a creative process. But when I become disconnected, I can be incredibly mean and hard on myself."
"Self-determination could mean independence, confederacy, federal and autonomy."
"I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it."
"In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another."
"There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors... I mean it."
"Understanding the times means understanding the course of history and civilization, as well as understanding the present situation. If we understand how God guides the development of human history, we can begin to understand the therapies needed to correct the problems of our times."
"Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability."
"To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad."
"I'm not in show business because I don't have to go to the meetings, I'm just not a part of it, I don't belong to it. When you "belong" to something. You want to think about that word, "belong." People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don't care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can't quite pin down."
"The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind."
"He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth."
"I believe I love my guitar more than the others love theirs. For John and Paul, songwriting is pretty important and guitar playing is a means to an end. While they're making up new tunes I can thoroughly enjoy myself just doodling around with a guitar for a whole evening. I'm fascinated by new sounds I can get from different instruments I try out. I'm not sure that makes me particularly musical. Just call me a guitar fanatic instead, and I'll be satisfied."
"Once I chanted the Hare Krishna mantra all the way from France to Portugal, nonstop. I drove for about twenty-three hours and chanted all the way. It gets you feeling a bit invincible. The funny thing was that I didn't even know where I was going. I mean I had bought a map, and I knew basically which way I was aiming, but I couldn't speak French, Spanish, or Portuguese. But none of that seemed to matter. You know, once you get chanting, then things start to happen transcendentally."
"Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the longer the tether of our slavery?"
"Today, any action anywhere on earth has an immediate repercussion on all five continents. News of a victory of the Eastern armies in Morocco or Shanghai travels instantly, thanks to modern means of communication, to all Eastern peoples and fills them with enthusiasm and faith. This phenomenon is, of course, unprecedented in the history of man."
"Ideal Love, stepped down to the level of the practical, day-to-day life, must mean the service of each to all within his or her sphere, a delicate consideration of others, a control that gives rise to peace, and cessation from every thought of cruelty and lust."
"Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."
"The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
"You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean it's useless."
"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."
