Quotes about being

page 43

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”

“A human being is like a television set with millions of channels…. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to recover our own sovereignty.”

“For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”

“Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.”

“Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…”

“And Kingsley being Kingsley, he smiled as he pretended to pull the trigger.”

“An honor is not diminished for being shared.”

“There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior.”

“She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.”

“I have seen this too many times before. The unwarranted devotion. Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can’t deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope.”

“Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.”

“The only two important things in life are real love and being at peace with yourself.”

“A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.”

“Don’t.” She looks directly into my eyes. After a month of being forced to avoid her, I feel stripped bare by her gaze. “You can be as much of a charming bastard as you want, but you’re never going to bullshit your way into my heart again.”

“I feel like I am floating in plasma
I need a teacher or a lover
I need someone to risk being involved with me.
I am so vain
and I am so masochistic.
How can they coexist?”

“The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.”

“She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.”

“For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.”

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.”

“Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.”

“Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”

“me: you know what sucks about love?
o. w. g.: what?
me: that it's so tied to the truth.

I know it sucks, but in a way, it's good…. Love and truth being tied together, I mean. They make each other possible, you know?”

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.”

“Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”

“They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.”

“To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”

“There were few things worse than being ordinary, in Evie’s opinion. Ordinary was for suckers.”

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.”

“She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.”

“We're of one mind, Grenville and I, and the mind is hers, on account of my being a man and not having one.”

“Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.”

“I don't know how you persist in being so stubborn-"
"It's a superpower. I was bitten by a radioactive mule.”

“I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.”

“and i can't stand the idea of being alone.
i can't bear the thought of being free.”

“When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.”

“i suppose i have a really loose interpretation of "work", because i think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. the machinery is always going. even when you sleep”

“Jessamine flushed. "I do. I mean, I did not. I mean--ugh! Charlotte, Will's being vexing."
"And the sun has come up in the east," said Jem, to no one in particular.”

“Nobody understands how hard it is, being a captain.”

“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.”

“See I'm the reckless and wild one who saves him from being boring. It's why we're perfect for each other. We balance. - Madame Selena”

“People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.”

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”

“Because i've suffered. Because many times in my life i have tried to love with all my heart, and my love has wound up being trampled or betrayed.”

“Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.”

“[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"

(, interview with Budd Mishkin;, March 25, 2007.)”

“Being sixteen forever sounded good until you really thought about it. Then it didn't seem like such a great prospect.”

“Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.”

“Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.”

“There is something incredibly arousing about being wanted. I pulled my hand back and sucked in a deep breath. “Adam,” I said.”

“People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.”

“This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”

“You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.”

“Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.”

“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure… To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”

“Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.”

“Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”

“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.”

“Human beings are the laziest creatures in the history of creation. We would rather not do anything if we could avoid it.”

“The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.”

“Real leadership is being the person others will gladly and confidently follow.”

“To deal with things knowledge of things is needed. To deal with
people, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself, you need
nothing. Be what you are--conscious being--and don't stray away from
yourself.”

“Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.”

“This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?”

“And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.”

“Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.”

“Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.”

“Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)”

“Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.”

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”

“Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person i want to be? Is today the day I die?”

“Oh where, oh where had Snow White gone?
She'd found it easy, being pretty
To hitch a ride into the city.”

“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”

“It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.”

“Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other….
Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.”

“Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.”

“Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.”

“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

“Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)”

“There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.”

“The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.”

“People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we?”

“Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too.”

“Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”

“It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious”

“They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.”

“Strength wasn‘t about being able to do everything alone. Strength was knowing when to ask for help and not being too proud to do it.”

“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?”

“Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.”

“What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.”

“Being free means "being free for the other," because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free”

“When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself”

“My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.”

“creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.”

“Stop being yourself and become who u always wanted to be”

“We’re on the enemy’s doorstep. We’re being asked to split up. Isn’t that how people get killed in horror movies?”

“There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.”

“Being the survivor stinks.”

“Really?"
"No. I'm being ironic. Or is it sarcastic? I can never remember."
"Irony's cleverer, so you're probably being sarcastic.”