Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Here, waltzes are called works! And Strauss and Lanner, who play them for dancing, are called Kapellmeistern. This does not mean that everyone thinks like that; indeed, nearly everyone laughs about it; but only waltzes get printed."
"Maybe I’m old, but to me, ‘going out’ means going out to dinner. It’s about the conversation: someone recognizing your intellect, the charm of flirting, and really speaking to somebody."
"I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it."
"No matter what, your parents are going to worry about you. I had a tour bus and my mother still thought I was broke. Remember: It's your life, not theirs. Just because your parents sent you to college doesn't mean they bought the rest of your life."
"Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow."
"Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that."
"Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer."
"People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake."
"I presume that you are compassionate: to be without pity means to be sick in body and spirit. But one should have spirit in abundance, so as to be permitted to be compassionate! For your pity is detrimental to you and to everyone."
"Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions."
"He who is usually self-sufficient becomes exceptionally vain and keenly alive to fame and praise when he is physically ill. The more he loses himself the more he has to endeavor to regain his position by means of the opinion of others."
"I do love the idea of being able to take an MP to court for lying. There are ways and means of taking an MP to court just now, but it is very difficult."
"Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow."
"People avoid action. Often because they are afraid of the consequences, for action means risk and danger. Danger seems terrible from a distance; it is not so bad if you have a close look at it"
"It's hilarious a lot of times. You have a conversation with someone, and he's like, 'You speak so well!' I'm like, 'What do you mean? Do you understand that's an insult?"
"If I was to stop making music tomorrow doesn't mean suddenly there is this gap. You don't get elected. The people decide where you are. Whether I'm here or not, if they want you to be at the top then the people will move me out the way."
"I like to say, Chop sueys the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another, because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means tsap sui, which, if you translate back, means odds and ends."
"The intellect is not the means of creation, and creation does not take place through the functioning of the intellect; on the contrary, there is creation when the intellect is silent."
"We gotta stop smokin', stop, stop. I mean cigarette smoking."
"There's so many people that dislike you all the time, so when somebody loves anything that you do, you go 'Yes! Finally!' Even if it means the dyn-o-mite thing."
