Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Quotes about being
page 10
Eleanor Roosevelt
(1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Aristotle
(-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”
William Shakespeare
(1564–1616) English playwright and poet
“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.”
Source: Ready Player One
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection”
John Powell
(1645–1713) American Jesuit priest
“It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.”
Nick Hornby
book
High Fidelity
Source: High Fidelity
Henry Beston
(1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.”
Source: Romeo and Juliet
Umberto Eco
(1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist
Source: "Why Are They Laughing In Those Cages?", in Travels in Hyperreality : Essays (1986), Ch. III : The Gods of the Underworld, p. 122
Context: The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed.
Context: The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.
“I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.”
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Henry Beston
(1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
M. Scott Peck
(1936–2005) American psychiatrist
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
Ronald Reagan
(1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)
“Become conscious of being conscious.”
Eckhart Tolle
(1948) German writer
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Fernando Pessoa
(1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
Eleanor Roosevelt
(1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
Leonardo Da Vinci
(1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
No published occurrence of such an attribution has yet been located prior to one in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre — Band 3 http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2411/pg2411.html by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Disputed
Variant: Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
“Schopenhauer as educator” ("Schopenhauer als Erzieher"), § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127
Untimely Meditations (1876)
Context: In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. … Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
Jimmy Carter
(1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)
Source: The One-Straw Revolution (1975), Chapter 3, p. 119
Seth Godin
(1960) American entrepreneur, author and public speaker
Source: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Variant: For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Context: People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Source: Pale Fire
“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America
“If you don't know when to be a human being, you don't know when to be a witch.”
Source: A Hat Full of Sky
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
“To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.”
Stephen R. Covey
(1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker
Linda
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Context: I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.
“Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.”
Eckhart Tolle
(1948) German writer
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
“That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.”
Jean Paul Sartre
(1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …
Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Sylvia Plath
(1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Anne Frank
(1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”
Jack, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Variant: I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda… I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), p. 400
Context: I've had enough of someone else's propaganda. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
“Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!”
Fernando Pessoa
(1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
Source: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems
“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
Henry Miller
(1891–1980) American novelist
Blaise Pascal
(1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
“Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else.”
Variant: Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.
Source: The Glass Menagerie
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Scholium Generale (1713; 1726)
Source: The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Context: This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these being form'd by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially, since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same nature with the light of the Sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems. And lest the systems of the fixed Stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those Systems at immense distances one from another.
“It wasn't about being happy or unhappy. I just didn't want to be me anymore.”
Source: What Happened to Goodbye
“I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.”
Sylvia Plath
(1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Preface to ' (1859).
Source: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Context: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. [Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewusstsein bestimmt. ] At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we can not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois modes of production as so many progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.
“Actually I don't remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.”
Jim Morrison
(1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), p. 22