Mean quotes

Mean

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

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Mean quotes (page 349 of 1399)

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Jo Brand Comedian, Writer
Mean

"Managers of hospitals, over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served."

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Jody Hill Director, Writer, Producer
Mean

"I have always liked kind of outsider characters. In the movies I grew up liking, you had more complicated characters. I don't mean that in a way that makes us better or anything. I just seem to like characters who don't really fit into. You always hear that from the studio: "You have to be able to root for them, they have to be likeable, and the audience has to be able to see themselves in the characters." I feel that's not necessarily true. As long as the character has some type of goal or outlook on the world, or perspective, you can follow that story."

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Joe Dante Film Director
Mean

"I like working with kid actors because they surprise you constantly. I mean, all actors do - but kids particularly."

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Joe Dante Film Director
Mean

"There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Mean

"To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Mean

"Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Mean

"Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquility of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Mean

"Wood burns because it has the proper stuff for that purpose in it; and a man becomes renowned because he has the necessary stuff in him. Renown is not to be sought, and all pursuit of it is vain. A person may, indeed, by skillful conduct and various artificial means, make a sort of name for himself; but if the inner jewel is wanting, all is vanity, and will not last a day."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Mean

"I reverence the individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who unweariedly advances, who knows the means conducive to his object, and can seize and use them."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Mean

"Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them."

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Johannes Kepler Astronomer, Mathematician
Mean

"I am much occupied with the investigation of the physical causes [of motions in the Solar System]. My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork ... insofar as nearly all the manifold movements are carried out by means of a single, quite simple magnetic force. This physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry."

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John Burroughs Naturalist, Writer
Mean

"Following World War II, the U.S. was the architect of the UN system, and the world financial system, and the Human Rights Declaration, and of course the United Nations is based here in New York City. But, unfortunately, especially in the last decade, the U.S. really has been turning its back on international agreements and the set of agencies and procedures that they create as a means for governing the world."

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John Cage Composer, Musician
Mean

"I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment."

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John Donne Poet, Cleric
Mean

"And if there be any addition to knowledge, it is rather a new knowledge than a greater knowledge; rather a singularity in a desire of proposing something that was not knownat all beforethananimproving, anadvancing, a multiplying of former inceptions; and by that means, no knowledge comes to be perfect."

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John Dyer Baizley Artist, Musician
Mean

"I tend to over extend myself without really thinking throughthe realities of completing so many projects in a year, which generally means I'm going to be a little bit behind. I suppose that's the nature of the beast."

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