Quotes about being

page 41

“Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.”

“as imperfect human beings, any of us, all of us, are subject at some time or another to make mistakes!”

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”

“Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?”

“If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian… I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.”

“The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.”

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.”

“Besides, I could hardly complain to the administration that I was being forced to learn magic.”

“Once you believe in yourself
and see your soul as divine and precious,
you'll automatically be converted
to a being who can create miracles.”

“Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.”

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

“She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.”

“Evil doesn't die. It never dies. It just takes on a new face, a new name. Just because we've been touched by it once, it doesn't mean we're immune to ever being hurt again. Lightning can strike twice.”

“Love cannot thrive simply by being offered. Sooner or later it must be accepted and reciprocated. It must be seen for what it is and nourished according to its needs, or it will die.”

“And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.”

“I was looking for the opposite, really -something that might put an end to being in love”

“love being such, or such,
the normal corners of your heart
will never guess how much
my wonderful jealousy is dark”

“The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don't have.”

“This is not going to be easy. I'm good at being bad, but I'm bad at being good. I don't know the first thing about good deeds.”

“We all belong here equally… Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.”

“I take much pleasure in being alone
but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.”

“we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility.”

“But let us not put our sights too high. We do not have to be saviours of the world! We are simply human beings, enfolded in weakness and in hope, called together to change our world one heart at a time. (163)”

“Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.”

“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like.”

“The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves… is what I call hell.”

“The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.”

“I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.”

“A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated." - from 'Cows in Art Class”

“You can either practice being right or practice being kind.”

“I'm tired of being your best friend. I'm tired of being second best. I won't settle for that anymore. It's all or nothing, Schuyler. You have to decide. Him or me.

- Oliver Hazzard-Perry”

“I suppose we must work on being gracious and grateful until we can do for ourselves. Someday the wheel of fate will put us in a position to be of use to them, and we will remember how much easier it is to give help than it is to accept it.”

“I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.”

“My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.”

“But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do.”

“He's always, always in my mind — not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself — but as my own being.”

“And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being
angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning
yourself without thinking about it.”

“Will-," Tessa began but it was too late, Church made a yowling noise at being woken, and lashed out with his claws. Will began to swear. Tessa left, unable to hide the slightest of smiles as she went.”

“Religion humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved. We are not animals governed by uncontrollable drives, animals that die for no apparent reason, but creatures made in the image of supreme being”

“God, if you ever loved me, open my eyes for me when I'm being this stupid! (Ron)”

“Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one.”

“You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”

“Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”

“If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, or being lied about, don't deal in lies. Or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.”

“He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.”

“When I meet someone I like being with more than I like being alone, I'll marry her.”

“Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”

“Patti, did art get us?'
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.'
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.”

“But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.”

“If you appeal to the crowd, either by being humorous or brutal or eccentric, you gain favor.”

“Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.”

“All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.”

“The thing about grown ups is that they're always wanting you to be this Great Hero and Leader. What's wrong with being NORMAL, for Thor's sake? What's wrong with just being SO-SO at stuff? They're just totally unrealistic…”

“The thrill of being ignored!”

“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”

“She was so tired of being strong.”

“Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.”

“That was the thing about being on the inside: the world was just going on, even when it seemed like time for you had stopped for good.”

“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”

“Choose to be kind over being right and you'll be right everytime.”

“Would you like to meet him? I could summon him up in a trice of you like. Being a warlock, and all.”

“Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top.”

“To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.”

“Do you really want to be happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you've got. Do you want to be really miserable? You can begin by being discontented.”

“My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.”

“By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.”

“You've never been in love," she said. "You don't understand."

"If being in love means giving up your freedom, not to mention your opportunities," Caitlin said, "Then I haven't missed anything.”

“Being smart as a whip includes knowing when not to crack it.”

“Being here? With you? I've met my subconscious, and he's not that sick.”

“Vampires were always either trying to kill me, or own me. God I hated being popular.”

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present - I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?”

“You keep showing up here? Being who you are?' There was a pause. 'I'm going to fall in love with you.' -Rehvenge”

“A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”

“She was sitting in a garden more beautiful than even her rampaging imagination could ever have conjured up, and she was being serenaded by trees.”

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.”

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

“Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.”

“Using supernatural beings to build the perfect weapon? Intriguing idea."

"Not really," I said. "They did it on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A sub-par season. I slept through half the episodes.”

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”

“You have grown abominably lazy, and you like gossip, and waste time on frivolous things, you are contented to be petted and admired by silly people, instead of being loved and respected by wise ones.”

“Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found.”

“Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.”

“There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body.”

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

“There comes a time when you're losing a fight that it just doesn't make sense to keep on fighting. It's not that you're being a quitter, it's just that you've got the sense to know when enough is enough.”

“Tory a father isn’t supposed to fear his fourteen-year-old daughter. That being sad, you terrify me.”

“Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.”

“A non-doer is very often a critic-that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.”

“It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.”

“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.”

“Most dancers I know, especially the talented and successful ones, seem to possess [my dog's] knack for living moment to moment. You see, their idea of time is related to those infinitely short moments when they are onstage being their superselves.”

“People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel”

“It's like being in love, discovering your best friend.”

“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.”

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world... The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.”

“but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.”

“This Treasury paper, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”

“Being a martyr is highly overrated.”

“Most courage comes from being too tired and hungry to be afraid anymore.”