Being Mean But True Quotes & Sayings

Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they ever taste of pure and abiding pleasure. — Socrates

Proverbs, and the wisdom literature in general, counter the idea that being spiritual means handing all decisions over to the leading of the Lord. The opposite is true. Proverbs reveals that God does not make all people's decisions for them, but rather expects them to use his gift of reason to interpret the circumstances and events of life within the framework of revelation that he has given. Yet when they have exercised their responsibility in decision-making, they can look back and see that the sovereign God has guided. — Graeme Goldsworthy

It is true, perhaps, that your beauty is not a flashy beauty, as is Asher's, or Jean-Claude's, or even your Nathaniel's, but it is beauty nonetheless. Perhaps the more precious, for it grows not at the first sight of the eye, but a little more each time one speaks with you or watches you move so commandingly into a situation, or watches the truth in your eyes when you say that you are not beautiful, and I realize that you mean it. That you are not being humble, or playing silly games, you simply do not see yourself."

"See, that's not beauty, that's pretty with a personality that you like."

"But do you not see, Anita, that there is beauty that hits the eye like a bolt of lighting, that burns and sears and blinds. It is more disaster than pleasure. But yours, yours is a beauty that lulls one into comfort, into not protecting one's eyes from the light, then one night you realize that the moon, too, has its beauty. — Laurell K. Hamilton

The artist is often misunderstood because, stepping outside himself and holding most details in great tension, he's about as complex as a shape-shifter; or a head with faces on all sides, but not necessarily in the negative connotation as one being two-faced usually implies. For instance, to be misunderstood can mean to be improperly deemed a troublemaker when that is not one's true intent: you see, to troublemakers, the artist knows that the peacemaker may seem like a troublemaker; therefore he may, whether in honesty or in jest, at times, present himself as a troublemaker for perceptual, artistic flair. But then to the artless peacemakers, because of this they will interpret him as a troublemaker. This is why the artist has so few allies. To the troublemakers he's a troublemaker, yet still the peacemakers a troublemaker. — Criss Jami

I know a lot of people who just say that they are sorry for mistakes that they do, but most seem to repeat the same mistake over and over. The thing that they don't realize is that you are being observed, and just cause you say your sorry for something doesn't mean you are forgiven, because a person that continues to
repeat the same sin's over and over are blinded to the true path to heaven and to eternal happiness. — Austin V. Songer

If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another; unchastity is not improved by adding perjury. The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made. — C.S. Lewis

We may be heartened by our sojourns on Sinai, but no man may live his life in the clouds. And what does pragmatism mean if not just this? We can only, as James told us again and again, understand the collective and distributive by living. Life is the true revealer: I can never understand the whole by reason, only when the heart-beat of the whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own being. — Mary Parker Follett

Half-Heartedness Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. Half-heartedness does not reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. — Rumi

It's not that I refuse to look at the world around me, but that I refuse to pretend it's anymore important than everything else, you know what I mean? The moments from the past or from the future, the unreal scenes from tales, dreams, the projects we push aside each day that exist in the doubt we stop having in order to live--they're all worlds as true as this one, and I neither abandon or degrade them. So, I suppose that if I live in so many spaces at once, being absent from this one from time to time should be excusable, don't you think? — Gustavo Faveron Patriau

Being Christian is not just obeying orders but means being in Christ, thinking like him, acting like him, loving like him; it means letting him take possession of our life and change it, transform it, and free it from the darkness of evil and sin ... Let us show the joy of being children of God, the freedom that living in Christ gives us which is true freedom, the freedom that saves us from the slavery of evil, of sin and of death! — Pope Francis

The epithet Sindhusthan besides being Vedic had also a curious advantage which could only be called lucky and yet is too substantial to be ignored. The word Sindhu in Sanskrit does not only mean the Indus but also the Sea-which girdles the southern peninsula - so that this one word Sindhu points out almost all frontiers of the land at a single stroke. Even if we do not accept the tradition that the river Brahmaputra is only a branch of the Sindhu which falls into flowing streams on the eastern and western slopes of the Himalayas and thus constitutes both our eastern as well as western frontiers. still it is indisputably true that it circumscribes our northern and western extremities in its sweep and so the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of our whole Motherland : the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu - from the Indus to the Seas. — Anonymous

I pride myself on being able to read whole chapters into a single syllable, you know? What girl doesn't? So when Lennon said "Hi", I ran through a whole list of possibilities. Was it, "Hi, I wish you were Chloe instead of Riley so I could make up with you"? Or did he mean, "You look exactly like the girl I'm totally over, so get out of my sight"? Or was it just, "Hi, I hope you're not as down on me as your sister is and, by the way, could you be careful not to spill anything, either"? But none of those sounded right. Finally I had to admit that he might have just been trying to say hello. Call me crazy, but it could be true! — Megan Stine

I don't think [being monogamous] is a natural instinct for human beings, but it doesn't mean I don't believe in monogamy or true love. I believe in finding a soul mate. Monogamy can be hard work for some people. I don't think it applies to everybody, and I don't think a lot of people can do it. — Scarlett Johansson

It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? — Charles Bukowski

People die of love. I'm one of the few who'll admit it. That doesn't mean it isn't true.
Take all the people who died yesterday, or last week, or last year. Subtract all the suicides and the so-called accidents of the brokenhearted. Take away the men who got blown away for being in the wrong bed at the wrong moment, the women in abusive marriages who died of cancer because they couldn't find any other exit from their lives. All the AIDS deaths except from the needles and the transfusions, the ones they call the innocent victims. Like if you have sex, you're guilty. Deserved just what you got.
Now tell me who all you've got left.
Without love the world would be overpopulated, except that without love it wouldn't be populated at all. Love giveth and love taketh away and all that crap. You'll probably say all those people died from the lack of love, but I say it's two sides of the same coin. So it's the same coin. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real - and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself. — Gerhard Richter

Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn't mean, "It's all right. We're going to heaven now." No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn't mean, "So there is a life after death." Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an "end." They are about a beginning. The beginning of God's new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God's "being-in-charge" is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it. — N. T. Wright

Cyrus's father looked at his son. "Is that true?"
Cyrus wouldn't look at his dad, or anyone else. It was hard to look tough when you're being held in someone's arms, but he did his best to pull it off, even crossing beefy arms across his chest.
"Cyrus, I asked you a question, don't make me ask twice."
"Yes," he finally said, very sullen.
"I don't know what got into him, but I'm sorry."
Kevin Appleton said, "When Becky does something wrong she does her own apologizing."
Cyrus's father glared at Appleton, but he said, "Apologize to the little girl, Cyrus."
"I didn't mean to hurt her. I wanted to hurt him!" He pointed his own dramatic finger at Matthew.
"Matthew didn't start the fight, Cyrus, you did. Apologize to both of them, now."
He turned a pouting face to Becky. "I'm sorry I hurt you, I didn't mean to."
"I don't accept!" Becky said. Her eyes were dark and furious. I liked her. — Laurell K. Hamilton

A student of color in one of my classes, for example, once told me that she noticed my cutting her off during class, something she didn't think I did with white students. I could have weighed in with my professional authority and said it wasn't true, that she was imagining it, that I treated all my students that way, that she was being too sensitive, that I travel all over the country speaking about issues of inequality and injustice, so certainly I was above such things. But what I said to her was that I was truly sorry she'd had that experience. I wasn't aware of doing that, I told her, and the fact that I didn't consciously mean to was beside the point.

To respond in this way, I had to de-center myself from my privilege and make her experience and not mine the point of the conversation. I ended by telling her I would do everything I could to oay attention to this problem in the future to make sure it didn't happen again. — Allan G. Johnson

You've heard all about me. I may sound desperate and tragic. But i'm not. The bit about me being single is true, but that doesn't mean I'm easy pickings or that I'm going to fall in to bed with the first man who buys me a cappuccino. Especially if he's married.
She felt dizzy with the effort of being so upfront — Eleanor Prescott

The true cost of the pollution that is being dumped into the atmosphere and manifests itself in our sick children dealing with asthma or older folks dealing with heart and lung disease from the pollutions created by the burning of these fossil fuels, may not be reflected in the prices of fossil fuels, but that does not mean we aren't paying a high price for them. — Mark Ruffalo

People are too quick to give their hearts away, i mean, be fearless; run wild into their arms, but for goodness sake know your worth. A being of wisdom knows their heart is the breath of their existence and only a honorable love deserves to feel it at its purest form. — Nikki Rowe

Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. — Eckhart Tolle

When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away. It's pretty mean but it's true. — Lily Allen

What I notice is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of actingthese days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine. Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow. — Douglas Coupland

They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling."
"But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean - only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"
"What did they mean about you?"
"Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. — Ayn Rand

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. — Jonathan Safran Foer

When I was a book editor, I got used to being told that my tastes were dark or edgy. These are not words that would've occurred to me, but I was told that enough that I have to believe it's true - that I like things that some other people find off-putting or upsetting. My job is to publish stuff that I really, really care about. That might mean that it doesn't sit well with everybody. — Lorin Stein

Solitude is escapist. People who like being alone are running away from 'reality', refusing to make the effort to 'commit' to real life and live instead in a half-dream fantasy world. They should 'man up', get real, get a grip. But if social life is so natural, healthy and joyous as contemporary society insists, why would anyone be 'escaping' from it?
Solitude is antisocial. Well of course it is - that's the point. This argument is tautological. But 'antisocial' is a term that carries implicit rather than explicit moral condemnation; it is clearly a 'bad thing' without it being at all clear what it might mean. All this actually says is 'solitude is preferring to be alone rather than with others/me [the speaker] and I am hurt.' It is true, but is based on the assumption that being alone is self-evidently a bad thing, and being social is equally self-evidently a good thing. — Sara Maitland

One can be a great artist without being a great technician. There have been many famous ballet stars who did not have the ideal body or total mastery of all aspects of the art form, but on the stage they possessed magnetism-true artistry, by which I mean a charismatic quality. You can work with a coach to try and develop it, but a true artist has the ability to express his inner feelings naturally. — Fernando Bujones

And another nice thing about war - not that anything about war is nice, I guess - is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing. See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn't be righter. You could of been a heller at home and made a lot of people unhappy and all, and been a dumb, mean bastard, but you're king over there - king to everybody, and especially to yourself. This above all, be true to yourself, and you can't be false to anybody else, and that's it - in a hole, being shot at and shooting back. — Kurt Vonnegut

Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that science can provide all of the answers. That is scientism and that is wrong. I don't think a billion buckets of science could speak to the problems raised by the Tea Party. Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that the only truths are those of science. I think the claim just made in the last sentence is true but I don't think it is a claim of science. It means that you use science where you can and you respect and try to emulate its standards. — Michael Ruse

It's true I've been hurt a few times after revealing myself. There are people who lie in wait for the vulnerable and pounce as a way to feel powerful. But God forgive them. I'm willing to take the occasional blow to find people I connect with. As long as you're willing to turn the other cheek with the mean ones, vulnerability can get you a wealth of friends. Can you imagine coming to the end of your life, being surrounded by people who loved you, only to realize they never fully knew you? Or having poems you never shared or injustices you said nothing about? Can you imagine realizing, then, it was too late? How can we be loved if we are always in hiding? — Donald Miller

This Being out of God cannot, by any means, be a limited, completed, and inert Being, since God himself is not such a dead Being, but, on the contrary, is Life; but it can only be a Power, since only a Power is the true formal picture or Schema of Life. And indeed it can only be the Power of realising that which is contained in itself a Schema. — Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Being an introvert doesn't mean you're shy. It means you enjoy being alone. Not just enjoy it - you need it. If you're a true introvert, other people are basically energy vampires. You don't hate them; you just have to be strategic about when you expose yourself to them - like the sun. They give you life, sure, but they can also burn you and — Amy Schumer

The idea that I am a bad person or exhibiting poor character traits by my disdain for someone can be irrelevant and false. If I meet someone I immediately dislike, for what ever reason, but I am polite and courteous, helpful and pleasant then I have been polite, courteous, helpful and pleasant. This is not at all the same as then finding someone else to gossip with and verbalize my disdain for that person. It is certainly not the same as being outright rude to that person. What I have thought is of no consequence here. My actions show who I am, not my thoughts. The same can be said of the basic premise of being spiritual itself. If I seek to be spiritual and yet find no time in my life for reflection on what this should and does mean to me am I being spiritual at all? The actions we relate to as being spiritual are the natural outcome of such reflection in our lives. When we are true to our own sense of integrity we naturally find compassion for others. — David Carlyle

Lots of people don't think little kids understand what adults are thinking or doing, Sometimes they - the adults, I mean - behave as if children are deaf and can't hear what's being said right in front of them. But none of that is true: they do understand, and even if they don't know what the words mean, they can feel the emotions behind the words. — Belinda Hollyer

A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away — Sri Aurobindo

Those old adages - you attract more with honey; do unto others - are true. You can get attention by being acerbic or mean or making a bizarre comment. But by being nice, being empathetic, building relationships and listening, people begin to recognize that you're thoughtful and respectful of their position. — Shelley Moore Capito

But is all this true?" said Brutha.
Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork."
"You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha.
"I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about. — Terry Pratchett

To be alone means that you avoid bad company. But to have a true friend is better than being alone. — Umar

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say. — Peter Sloterdijk

True healing means drawing the circle of our being larger and becoming more inclusive, more capable of loving. In this sense, healing is not for the sick alone, but for all humankind. — Richard Moss

They say being in love and loving someone are two different things, right? I mean, you love your best friend, but you love your husband, right? Falling in love with someone is easy. It's loving when the newness has worn off, when life gets tough, when things get in the way, when physical passion is gone, that true love remains. When love can conquer it all. — Mia Asher

I mean, the fight for a health care bill to cover all Americans and leave none behind is attacked as being a race appeal, which is not true, but then it's put out in the media as true. — Jesse Jackson

If we are nothing, there is nothing at all to serve as a barrier to our boundless expression of love. Being nothing in this way, we are also, inevitably, everything. 'Everything' does not mean self-aggrandizement, but a decisive recognition of interconnection; we are not separate. Both the clear, open space of 'nothing' and the interconnected mess of 'everything' awakens us to our true nature. — Sharon Salzberg

People think I'm controversial for the answers I give to silly questions in interviews, but if somebody asks me what I think about Live 8 or Robbie Williams or Madonna, I'm not thinking about insulting those people; I say what I genuinely feel is in my heart. My conscience is clean, d'you know what I mean? Y'know, I'm true to myself - fuck everybody else. — Noel Gallagher

Give me your time, your honesty, your respect, kindness, patience, fidelity. Give me comfort when things are tough ... I give off an air of being self-sufficient and instead of expressing and demanding the right kind of love for myself, I always wanted to appear like I was fine, in fact, I thought I was fine - and so did they. But it wasn't true. Just because you're a strong girl doesn't mean you don't need to be loved and cared for like anybody else. And it doesn't matter where you sit in this world, poor or rich, famous or not, we all need to be loved in the right way. — Jennifer Lopez

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel) — Haruki Murakami

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true. — Agnes Varda

Courage does not mean being unafraid." "True, but everyone doesn't have to know I was shaking in my boots. Literally." "I am not everyone. I still cannot believe you are real," he said softly. His lips moved against her cheek, a brush lighter than a butterfly wing, yet she felt it all the way to her toes. That small caress sent — Christine Feehan