Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears."
"Yes, people pull the trigger - but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary, and delay means more death and horror."
"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave."
"To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life."
"Just because I don't have a college degree doesn't mean I am not smart!"
"We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction."
"And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real."
"We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology however frank and open our behaviour we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him."
"What we really need is somebody who loves us so much we don’t worry about death, or about [anything for that matter]… We need this; we need this so we can love other people purely and not for selfish gain, we need this so we can see everybody as equals, we need this so our relationships can be sincere, we need this so we can stop kicking ourselves around, we need this so we can lose all self-awareness and find ourselves for the first time, not by realizing some dream, but by being told who we are by the only Being who has the authority to know, by that I mean the Creator."
"Negative emotions are like unwelcome guests. Just because they show up on our doorstep doesn't mean they have a right to stay."
"Have you ever had the sensation of looking at someone for the first time and ever so quickly the past and future seem to fuse ? Does that not mean something ? That we felt so much, so deeply, before even speaking?"
"I mean people are really crazy about minor decrements down. And then, if you act on them, then you get into reciprocation tendency, because you don't just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity, and the whole thing can escalate. And so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you're losing or almost getting and not getting."
"Direct aggression against Cuba would mean nuclear war. The Americans speak about such aggression as if they did not know or did not want to accept this fact. I have no doubt they would lose such a war."
"Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common. We both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression. But Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera, I'll kill you. I mean it."
"The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress."
"I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort - I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form - all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do."
"Even when I wrote Basic myself the day before I burned it into a computer I wasn't making design changes. I didn't have a testing team. I did all the testing myself. And there was no project methodology or schedule that, there was the notion of coming to a close means testing a lot at the end and making very few changes."
"Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes, I think. It's not a negative thing. It's not a mean thing. It's just something that happens in life, like autumn."
"With acting, I think half of it is just acting confident. We stand on these red carpets and pose in these dresses, but we're all only so confident. It doesn't mean we think we're great looking or anything. It's all a façade."
"I mean, I think I liked every band I ever played in because each band was different, each band had a different concept, and each band leader was different... different personalities and musical tastes."
