Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"It is true that one was not allowed at the time to really ask, what would lead people to do this, from what sense of political outrage or injury? And in that way, the possibility of sympathetic identification was foreclosed. That does not mean that some people took quiet pleasure in certain icons of US capitalism coming down, even though they would oppose such action on moral and political grounds."
"I did not mean to argue that gender is fluid and changeable (mine certainly is not). I only meant to say that we should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world."
"People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again."
"People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them; it gives you a set of rules."
"Meanwhile, the empty forms of social behavior survive inappropriately in business situations. We all know that when a business sends its customers 'friendly reminders,' it really means business."
"When you're visiting an antiques fair, turn left once you've passed through the entrance. Everyone else will turn right, which means you can get to the bargains before them."
"I see that it is by no means useless to travel, if a man wants to see something new"
"There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone."
"You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer?"
"Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?"
"He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down."
"Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?"
"For my daughter, it's going to mean something special that Hillary Clinton accepts the nomination, and I wanted to make sure that she sees that."
"We've seen tremendous progress in many ways under President [Barack] Obama. I mean, if we think about where the economy was when he got in - you know, we were losing more than 700,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate was skyrocketing. And now it's at under 5 percent, so there is a lot of progress that has happened."
"This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist."
"I drifted into a career in academic philosophy because I couldn't see anything outside the academy that looked to be anything other than drudgery. But I wouldn't say I 'became a philosopher' until an early mid-life crisis forced me to confront the fact that, while 'philosophy' means 'love of wisdom', and 'wisdom' is the knowledge of how to live well, the analytic philosophy in which I had been trained seemed to have nothing to do with life."
"I detest producing. I mean, I feel like I do it to enable myself to do all the other stuff that I do love, but I find it's in conflict with the other roles because the producer needs to be the one who says "No" and the director and the writer need to let their mind be free."
"Listen and learn: you need fourteen characters, minimum. Use random letters, not words. Here’s a tip: think of a sentence, and use the first letter in each of those words. Mix it up between upper and lower case. Then pick two numbers that mean something to you – not dates – and stick them somewhere between the letters. Put a punctuation mark at the beginning of the password and then a symbol, like a dollar sign, at the end."
"Just because we haven’t met Mr. Right doesn’t mean we’re doing anything wrong. And by the way, you’re brilliant and awesome, too. If I were a lesbian, I’d totally settle down with you and make lots of in vitro babies."
"Hopefully when he moved his things out of the apartment, he at least took his CDs. I mean, we might be gay, but… Enya? Really?"
