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.
"I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to."
"The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters."
"To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do."
"Because I want every kid to be viewed as a person rather than as a member of a certain race does not mean that I'm not black enough. . . . Do they want me to be positive just for black kids and negative for everybody else?"
"Violence is not the only means of persuasion."
"The work-life balance is a harsh reality for so many women, who are forced every day to make impossible choices. Do they take their kids to the doctor...and risk getting fired? Do they work weekends so they can afford to send their kids to better childcare...even though it means even less time with their families? Do they take another shift at work, so they can pay for piano lessons for their kids...even though it means they have to stop volunteering for the PTA? It just shouldn't be this difficult to raise healthy families."
"If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions."
"While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them."
"Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death."
"I would never try and play like Harry James, because I don't like his tone - for me. It's just white. You know what I mean? He has what we black trumpet players call a white sound. But it's for white music ... I can tell a white trumpet player, just listening to a record. There'll be something he'll do that'll let me know that he's white."
"Some musicians play with their heart, you know what I mean? I don't know what to tell a person that can't - if you can't tell a person what you're talkin' about when they're rushin' or droppin' the tempo, you get somebody else."
"Heaven forbids, it is true, certain gratifications, but there are ways and means of compounding such matters."
"I did not take the name, I just named myself Cassius Clay, this is a honorable, Mohammed Ali, given to me by my religious leader and teacher, the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, and I would like to say that Mohammed means in Arabic "one who is worthy of praise" and one praiseworthy, and Ali means the most High, but the slave name Clay meant dirt with no ingredients."
"The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time."
"Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef."
"Living intensely each present day means letting Christ dwell within you. His words are so clear: Today I would like to enter your home."
"Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of."
"What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude."
"The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption."
"The business of the English commander-in-chief being first to bring an enemy fleet to battle on the most advantageous terms to himself, (I mean that of laying his ships close on board the enemy, as expeditiously as possible); and secondly to continue them there until the business is decided."
