Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I don't know what my expectations are. It's like the word 'potential.' Those two words don't mean a whole lot to me. We can't please everybody. Certainly, we have to please ourselves first."
"Only few know what righteousness is. It is righteous to suffer for your own foolishness. When you sin, it is righteous to bear the consequences of your sin without complaining. Saying what you mean and what is on your heart when you deal with other people, that is righteous. One who hungers and thirsts for righteousness will be filled-and being filled with righteousness is something very great."
"National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age."
"If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl."
"The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within."
"There's high, and then there's high, and to get really high--I mean so high that you can walk on the water, that high--that's where I'm goin'"
"When you're in love, when somebody says something like, "How can you be with that woman?" you say, "What do you mean? I am with this goddess of love, the fulfillment of my whole life. Why are you saying this? Why do you want to throw a rock at her or punish me for being in love with her?"
"..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel."
"Not fair? Oh, I'm sorry I get this lovely laptop computing device when all you get is the ability to walk, control your hands, and know you'll survive until your eighteenth birthday." Then the kid was going, "Uh, I didn't mean..." But Tad wasn't done yet. While the whole class watched in horror, he put his hands through the metal support braces on the arms of his wheelchair and forced himself to stand up. Then he took a shaky little step to the side, gestured toward the chair, and said, "Why don't you take a turn with the laptop? You can even have my seat."
"It was necessary, temporarily, to limit certain requirements, accumulate necessary means, strain forces. We acted precisely in this way and built a socialist society."
"I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music."
"Just because you feel fear doesn't mean you can't do it. Do it afraid"
"If you make a mistake, it doesn't mean you're a mistake."
"In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed."
"Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were only made for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved."
"To 'justify' means nothing else than to acquit of guilt him (her) who was accused as if his own innocence were confirmed."
"There is no golden mean between these two extremes; either this early life must become low in our estimation, or it will have our inordinate love."
"At some level it's still hard for me to admit that my father died. I can talk about it and around it, but those two words. 'He died.' What can that possibly mean? That I won't get to hear his voice again?"
"One of the myths about Dad was that he was mean. That simply wasn't true. I always found him generous to a fault but he wasn't reckless with his money, which was rather rare in Hollywood. He'd grown up with nothing and he wasn't about to fritter it all away."
"I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it."
