Mean quotes

Mean

28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

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Mean quotes (page 200 of 1399)

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John Keats Poet
Mean

"it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

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John Carroll Actor
Mean

"Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means."

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John Carroll Actor
Mean

"Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. ... Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own."

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Joan Didion Author, Essayist
Mean

"One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."

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Jeff Smith Chef
Mean

"I'm so hungry, comrade! It has been days since we ate those two raccoons!' 'I know comrade. I'm even beginning to wish we had some of your homemade quiche!' 'Oh comrade! Do you mean it?' 'Hey--Hey! None of that! If you ever tell anyone I said that, I'll deny it!"

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Jeff Bezos Entrepreneur
Mean

"I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term."

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Hermann Hesse Novelist, Poet
Mean

"All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All."

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Marshall McLuhan Philosopher, Media Theorist
Mean

"The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes."

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Marshall McLuhan Philosopher, Media Theorist
Mean

"Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual."

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Marshall McLuhan Philosopher, Media Theorist
Mean

"The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces."

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Martha Graham Dancer, choreographer
Mean

"I love words very much. I've always loved to talk, and I've always love words — the words that rest in your mouth, what words mean and how you taste them and so on. And for me the spoken word can be used almost as a gesture."

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Hippocrates Physician
Mean

"There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death."

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Homer Poet
Mean

"When a woman says nothing's wrong, that means everything's wrong. And when a woman says everything's wrong, that means everything's wrong! And when a woman says something's not funny, you'd better not laugh your ass off!"

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Leader
Mean

"So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends."

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Matt Smith Actor
Mean

"I don't think anything could prepare you for whatever fame is. Fame is a very hard word to define cause it means different things to different people for different reasons so I never really think of it as fame, I think of it as part of the job."

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