“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”
Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant
Variant: The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
Quotes about being page 38
“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Michael Singer (1945) American landscape architect
Source: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist
Source: Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons
Theodore Sturgeon book E Pluribus Unicorn
Source: E Pluribus Unicorn
Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXII : Traits of Friendship; Arthur to Helen
Context: I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other; besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity.
“and will I like being called a jazz baby? --You will love it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
L.J. Smith (1965) American author
Source: Night World, No. 1
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer
Quoted in "Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale" (1809) in Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), vol. II, p. 333, edited by George Birkbeck Hill; also quoted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, in the Avenged Sevenfold song "Bat Country", and in Kingdom S02E04.
“Getting old we can deal with. Being old is the problem”
Mitch Albom (1958) American author
Source: Have a Little Faith: a True Story
“Being kissed on the back
of the knee is a moth
at the windowscreen….”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States
Source: Love Poems
George Lois (1931) American art director, designer and author
“Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”
Laura Lippman book What the Dead Know
Source: What the Dead Know
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis
Source: Sexuality and the Psychology of Love
“The nerve. Threatening you and not being precise about it.”
Karen Marie Moning (1964) author
Source: Dreamfever
“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.”
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer
This I Believe (1951)
Context: I believe in human beings, but my faith is without sentimentality. I know that in environments of uncertainty, fear, and hunger, the human being is dwarfed and shaped without his being aware of it, just as the plant struggling under a stone does not know its own condition. Only when the stone is removed can it spring up freely into the light. But the power to spring up is inherent, and only death puts an end to it. I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
“One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.”
Deb Caletti (1963) American writer
Source: Stay
“People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.”
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) French poet
Source: The Cubist Painters
“being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States
“I love being reminded that existence itself is all about the tangling of souls.”
Carolyn Mackler (1973) American writer
Source: Tangled
“All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.”
Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood
Source: Norwegian Wood
“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.”
Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor
Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)
Context: I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.
“You just click your heels and think there's no place like being pwned.”
Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym
Source: Pale Demon
“Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States
Source: The Complete Poems
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
“We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.”
Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha
Source: Memoirs of a Geisha
Daniel H. Pink book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Source: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”
Donna Tartt book The Secret History
Source: The Secret History
Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books
Variant: Being crazy isn't enough.
“Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.”
Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer
Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer
Source: An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington
“Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”
Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist
As quoted in Bisexual Characters in Film: From Anaïs to Zee (1997) by Wayne M. Bryant, p. 143
Attributed
“Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”
Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene
Source: The Selfish Gene
“You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me.”
Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay
Gale and Katniss (p. 197)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: "I don't stand a chance if he doesn't get better. You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me."
"The way I always felt wrong kissing him because of you," I say.
“Middle school is for being like everyone else; middle age is for being like yourself. (430)”
Victoria Moran (1950) American writer
Source: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
“Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.”
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist
Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
“Maybe being home schooled, Carter didn’t realize that “test” is normally a bad thing.”
Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid
Source: The Red Pyramid
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer
Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
“A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer
Essays, Are Women Human? (1938)
“Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.”
Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist
Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 2
