Etre Quotes & Sayings

I try to find stories that I would think that everyone would find interesting, and just a good entertaining story, and then if I can find a story that has a raison d'etre behind it that I feel is important then that's the best for me. — Norman Jewison

Each alter personality had a common goal and raison d'etre, namely my survival. They didn't all realize that though, and so were at odds with each other much of the time. So I continued to be fragmented and divided. — Carolyn Bramhall

People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, 'Hardly.' You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and then when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy. — Helen Fisher

If you read this, read it for that reason that Lestat is talking again, that he is frightened, that he is searching desperately for the lesson and for the song and for the raison d'etre, that he wants to understand his own story and he wants you to understand it, and that it is the very best story he has right now to tell. If that's not enough, read something else.
If it is, read on. In chains, to my friend and my scribe, I dictated these words.
Come with me. Just listen to me. Don't leave me alone. — Anne Rice

And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die. — Robert Fisk

It is necessary to be focused. This is the raison d'etre of career. — Frederick Lenz

Genius is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

J'aurais du etre plus gentille - I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. — Khaled Hosseini

Let us never stop being vigilant about the Oys which face us. But let us never turn them into our raison d'etre. Let us also celebrate the JOYS. — Deborah Lipstadt

Performing, not rehearsing, is a dancer's raison d'etre, and I've been lucky to 'etre' in some extraordinary places - Cuba, Paris, Mongolia. In particular, a two-week stint in Greece leaps to mind. We danced in the Acropolis's Herodes Atticus amphitheater, once a venue for gladiator spectacles. — Sascha Radetsky

There are fewer metaphors around than people think. — Terry Pratchett

But as much as this is a soldier's reason d'etre, it is not often that you hear a soldier explicitly talk about 'killing'. The k-word as a verb is instead often disguised and supplanted by any number of other euphemisms. In precise and technical military parlance, reflecting the ever more precise and technically removed means of killing, the 'enemy' becomes the 'target'. But for the soldiers who personally 'engage' these 'targets', these objects are colloquially 'slotted', 'dropped', 'hit', 'fragged', 'sawn in half', 'smashed' or just plain 'shot'.
Then the soldier will have achieved the noun of a 'kill'.
The author's supposition is that such words are used by the soldier in combat as an attempt to mentally dissociate himself from the reality of his actions, so he can continue to operate as a soldier - and perhaps, when all is finally said and done, as a human being back home. — Jake Wood

There is more both of beauty and of raison d'etre in the works of nature- than in those of art. — Aristotle.

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'etre, which is a French expression that I know. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Facts and information are the nourishment, the lifeblood, the raison d'etre, and also the bane and despair of librarians and researchers. — Kee Malesky

Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price. — Robert Orben

Because ethics is fundamentally about questioning the ends, the goals and aims of our actions, we must come back to the rules and ask why. So we must return to the philosophy of law, the raison d'etre and the point of what we're asked to do. It's not easy, it's very demanding and it needs intellectual courage. — Tariq Ramadan

Psychic awareness leads to a true perception not only of events, but just of life itself. It is its own raison d'etre. — Frederick Lenz

Adrien, people get killed all the time. Since when is it your job to find out what happened to them?"
"I'm not usually suspected of murdering them."
"You have been as long as I've known you. — Josh Lanyon

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre. — Steven Chu

Eliza's constant harping didn't even get to Martha, although it sometimes seemed that Eliza's raison d'etre was to urinate on Martha's parade. — Adele Parks

When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said ... She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back
undoing what she had just done
so that she could know I was OK. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace. — Ann Voskamp

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action. — D.H. Lawrence

Life works in mysterious ways, and I believe one of the biggest challenges and successes is to let go and let it be. — Brittany Burgunder

What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence ... And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well. — Caridad Svich

The eternal raison d'etre of America is in its being the "sweet land of liberty". Should a land so dreamed into existence, so degenerate through material prosperity as to become what its European critics, with too much justice, have scornfully renamed it the "Land of the Dollar" - such a development will be one of the sorriest conclusions of history, and the most colossal disillusionment that has ever happened to mankind. — Frank Norris

One should never marry a man who doesn't own a decent set of scissors. That would be my advice. It leads to bad things. — Gillian Flynn

My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think Socrates made a very profound statement when he asserted that the raison d'etre of philosophy is to teach us proper living. In this day and age 'proper living' means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity and indoctrination, mental oppression. — Angela Davis

The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place ti is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. — Edward W. Said

Life has no meaning. It doesn't need a meaning. A meaning is an arbitrary thought formulation that we affix to it because we are in the mood. Life is its own raison d'etre. — Frederick Lenz

It is not wise to be wiser than is necessary.
[Fr., Ce n'est pas etre sage
D'etre plus sage qu'il ne le faut.] — Philippe Quinault

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely - those against private citizens or those against itself?
The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.
Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'etre. — Murray N. Rothbard

Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society's energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings. — Alan Weisman

President Obama understands that, as a nation founded by those who fled religious persecution, freedom of religion is central to who we are as Americans. Our rights are not given to us by government, they are endowed by our Creator. — Denis McDonough

..for a man ( Roger Scruton ) whose calling and raison d'etre is that difficult business - not just telling the truth but finding out what the truth would be like if we told it - it was a huge blow to be exposed as a lickspittle of tobacco giants. If your job is enquiry, you cannot accept money for providing the answers before the question has been examined. — A. N. Wilson