Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"It's very easy to confuse confident motion with being productive - and they're not the same thing. Productive to me means measurable outcomes that apply to my most important to-dos that positively affect my life. That's it."
"Yeah. Iʼve always felt this way. I mean weʼre born alone, we die alone. And while weʼre here we are absolutely, completely sealed in our own bodies. Really weird. Kinda freaks me out to think about it. We can only experience the outside world through our own slanted perception of it. Who knows what youʼre really like. I just see what I think youʼre like."
"Focus on executing to give maximum value to your customers. That means learning everything from financing to producing to marketing."
"Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it."
"Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it."
"The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels."
"It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means."
"By all means, fire the customers who aren't worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you've just started the firing process."
"If you have the feeling of choice, if you feel free, you will be better off. And when I say better off I mean that if people feel they have control over their lives, they call in for fewer sick days from work. They have a lesser probability of having a heart attack or stroke. They live longer. They're happier."
"I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something."
"By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind."
"There's nothing I miss about anything in the whole wide world. The idea of missing something means you're not living in the moment. Every moment is good for something."
"You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live."
"How well I know what I mean to do When the long dark Autumn evenings come, And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? With the music of all thy voices, dumb In life’s November too! I shall be found by the fire, suppose, O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose!"
"The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity."
"Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute."
"To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc."
"Success means crossing a limit. To cross a limit you need to assume that you have a limit. Assuming a limit is underestimating yourself. If you have no boundaries then where is your success?"
"Where love is thick, faults are thin. If you really love someone, then it is difficult to find fault with him. His faults seem negligible, for love means oneness."
"I think if I were a superhero saving the world, I'd expect at least not to have to pay income taxes. I mean there should be something in it for a hero who risks his life to save mankind every day."
