Top 100 Meant By Quotes
#1. He made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of talk
why had she said this? what had she meant by that? why had she done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation, and with a young man of Ogden's temperament speculation was but the first step on the way to love.
Henry Blake Fuller
#2. Why does my action strike them as so horrible? Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the law ... and that's enough.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#3. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.
Zadie Smith
#4. My mam told me not to tell many people about not being christened, as she said I would be a prime target for witches. To this day I don't know what she meant by that.
Karl Pilkington
#5. Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity. Begin now, or you will end up with your saint in the madhouse.
Robertson Davies
#6. I'm still not sure what is meant by good fortune and success. I know fame and power are for the birds. But then life suddenly comes into focus for me. And, ah, there stand my kids.
Lee Iacocca
#7. Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love without limits.
Albert Camus
#8. The teacher that I was for decades, and that I still am in a certain way, wondered what was meant by the word education. I was truly dumbfounded at the very thought of dealing with such an essential and extensive subject.
Abdoulaye Wade
#9. What is meant by this term, 'the heart'? According to the general scriptural usage of the term, the heart means the centre of the personality. It does not merely mean the seat of the affections and the emotions.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
#10. When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves he isn't a man of action.
Georges Clemenceau
#11. Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?
It's fucking spherical, Catamounts.
Sam Lipsyte
#12. I marveled a bit at the feat Lubianka re-education. I also began to understand more clearly what was meant by rewriting history for the proletariat and how it could be arranged that young people would hear nothing whatsoever of God.
Walter Ciszek
#13. What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes.
Annie Besant
#14. Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.
Maggie Stiefvater
#15. As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by 'survival of the fittest.'
Bill Cosby
#16. If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.
Kurt Vonnegut
#17. I couldn't lose her. So I didn't let her go." "'Didn't let her go'? That's what you meant by you kept someone.
Laurelin Paige
#18. They sometimes behave like the Delphic oracle that told King Croesus that if he crossed the Halys River he would destroy a large kingdom. It was only after he had been completely defeated in battle after the crossing that he discovered that the kingdom meant by the oracle was his own.
C. G. Jung
#19. My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.
Yaa Gyasi
#20. Funnily enough, when I was leaving school and they asked you what you were going to do, and I just liked acting, that's never what I would say. I would always say I would go into business, even though I didn't really know what was meant by that.
Kylie Minogue
#21. She looked like someone he must have known all his life. She looked like a little piece of home - whatever the devil his mind meant by presenting him with that odd idea.
Mary Balogh
#22. When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.
Enrico Fermi
#23. This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment. (p. 286)
Eugene Taylor
#24. This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other's personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?
Lawrence Durrell
#25. Asked to state his opinion of me, he said that I was "all right" and, when told to explain what he meant by that, he replied that everyone knew what that meant.
Albert Camus
#26. The problem of defining exactly what is meant by the signal velocity, which cropped up as long ago as 1907, has not been solved.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#27. Thus the right of nullification meant by Mr. Jefferson is the natural right, which all admit to be a remedy against insupportable oppression.
James Madison
#28. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied:
The same as you do when you infest the whole world;
but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber,
and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.
Saint Augustine
#29. The familiar warmth from the church saturated his heart. Was this what Mom meant by Christmas joy?
Jennifer Gladen
#30. I'm sure you know by now, Jesse Jackson was overheard saying, and I'll put this more delicately, that he wanted to cut Barack Obama's testicles off. And Jesse has been on several news programs the last couple of days, explaining what he meant by those comments. Do you need to explain that?
Jay Leno
#31. It would hardly be kindness if he didn't punish sin, not to use every means to put the evil thing far from us. Whatever may be meant by the place of misery Mr. Sutherland, it's only another form of his love. Love shining through the fogs of evil, and thus made to look very different.
George MacDonald
#32. Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.
William Morris
#33. What is meant by believing in Christ but just going with trusting and loving hearts, and committing to His love and power ourselves, our souls, and all that concerns us for time and eternity?
Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd
#34. What is meant by calling the writings of Moses and the Prophets
Adolph Saphir
#35. The getting that (favour) leads to the apprehension (of losing it), and the losing it leads to the fear of (still greater calamity): - this is what is meant by saying that favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared.
Lao-Tzu
#36. To make a division of power effectual, a veto in one form or another is indispensable. The right of each to judge for itself of the extent of the power allotted to its share, and to protect itself in its exercise, is what, in reality, is meant by a division of power.
John C. Calhoun
#37. What is meant by cause? Cause is the fine state of the manifested state.
Swami Vivekananda
#38. What Wiesenfeld meant by "alternative," and what was hinted by RBG's use of the phrase life partner was a marriage in which the woman didn't lose herself and her autonomy, in which two humans shared their lives and goals on equal footing.
Irin Carmon
#39. I have a lot of scars, man. My mother said that a man is not a man unless he has a scar on his face. And what she meant by a scar was some kind of battle that you had to go through, whether it was psychological or physical. To her, a scar was actually beautiful and not something that marred you.
Nick Nolte
#40. That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
Oscar Wilde
#41. If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.
Mencius
#42. All models are wrong, but some models are useful.90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be.
Nate Silver
#43. A leading difficulty with the average player is that he totally misunderstands what is meant by concentration. He may think he is concentrating hard when he is merely worrying.
Bobby Jones
#44. Incomprehensible, his colleagues tended to say when they discovered young people who had chosen to take their own lives. Harry assumed they said that to protect themselves, to reject the whole idea of it. If not, he didn't understand what they meant by its being incomprehensible.
Jo Nesbo
#46. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They're not last words but passwords, and as soon as they're spoken you can go.
Daniel Wallace
#47. Then, when Amelia was married, she found that the giving and receiving of forgiveness was a little like exercise. You didn't enjoy having to do it, but once you did, it got easier - and you learned to need it. Maybe that was what the Bible meant by being "exercised in the
Adina Senft
#48. This is what is meant by being single-minded. If you choose something, choose it with all your might, with all your heart. Don't be faint-hearted. Keep going! Keep moving toward it. Be determined.
Neale Donald Walsch
#49. (...) What's meant by "reproductive rights," of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn't I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?
Rebecca Solnit
#50. Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action; this is what is meant by liberty
Frederic Bastiat
#51. I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]
Philip Pullman
#52. Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.
Fred D'Aguiar
#53. The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.
Charles Fort
#54. The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They're all dressed the same.' 'Ah, those people,' said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. 'Those people ... well, they're not people at all, Bruno.' Bruno frowned. 'They're not?' he asked, unsure what Father meant by that.
John Boyne
#55. I supposed this is what is meant by 'growing up'...Find out the difference between what one expected one's life would be like and how things really are" -Lady Constance
Maryrose Wood
#56. It's absolutely fine when Wile E. Coyote walks in with a band-aid on his head, after a 3,000-pound rock is dropped on him. That is what Ed Wood meant by the suspension of disbelief.
Johnny Depp
#57. a still water that ran deep." I still don't know what she meant by that, except quiet people did exude some illusion of mystery that kept you wondering just what they really were beneath the surface.
V.C. Andrews
#58. At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
Bertrand Russell
#59. Being moderate with oneself and generous with others; this is what is meant by having a just relationship with money, by being free as far as money is concerned.
Natalia Ginzburg
#60. To complete our account of Marx's main ideas, therefore, we need to ask: what kind of society did Marx hope would take the place of capitalism? This question is easily answered in a single word: communism. It is difficult to answer it more adequately, that is, to say what Marx meant by communism.
Anonymous
#61. Lady Gaga said to me, 'You showed me how it's done.' I have no idea what she meant by 'it.'
Morrissey
#62. We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.
Scot McKnight
#63. And we must still try or we would be leaving our friends to fight without us. I think this is what you have meant by duty, all along; I do understand, at least this much of it.
Naomi Novik
#64. Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy
#65. Twelve years ago I made a mock
Of filthy trades and traffics;
I considered what they meant by stock;
I wrote delightful sapphics;
I knew the streets of Rome and Troy,
I supped with fates and Fairies
Twelve years ago I was a boy,
A happy boy at Drury's.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed
#66. While vast continents are shrouded in darkness ... the burden of proof lies upon you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by God to keep you out of the foreign mission field.
Ion Keith-Falconer
#67. This lack of fit between logic and statistically based decision is not something that can be accounted for by finding a faulty assumption in Cohen's paradoxes. It lies at the heart of what is meant by logic.
David Salsburg
#68. I understand what the Greeks meant by this: Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears.
Paulo Coelho
#69. I hate it when people repeat the last thing that's been said to them because they're too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. "You want to remember this moment," I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I'm a coward.
Dale Peck
#70. After work, she wandered around the center of Baltimore, aimlessly, interested in nothing. Was this what the novelists meant by ennui?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#71. This perhaps is what is meant by hiraeth: a lifelong yearning for what is gona and out of reach.
Alice Thomas Ellis
#72. Dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such?
Anne Tyler
#73. This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government's petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don't.
Jeremy Clarkson
#74. Before the first workout, Joe Schultz, the manager (he's out of the old school, I think, because he looks like he's out of the old school - short, portly, bald, ruddy-faced, twinkly eyed), stopped by while I was having a catch. "How you feeling, Jim?" he asked. I wonder what he meant by that.
Jim Bouton
#75. I believe you're speaking English, Turner, but I'm not sure you're doing a good job of it. It makes a girl wonder what you meant by, 'Here, let me take you to gaol.'" "I always mean precisely what I say, even if I don't say precisely what I
Courtney Milan
#76. Diplomacy, of course, is a subtle and nuanced craft, so much so that it's said that when the most wily diplomat of the nineteenth-century passed away, other diplomats asked, on reports of his death, What do you suppose the old fox meant by that?
Ronald Reagan
#77. All theology consists in finding out what is meant by the words "He is." Let us begin.
Frank Sheed
#79. Perhaps the best thing which can be said about newspapers in the United States is that they are in chronic disagreement with each other. That is what is meant by a free press.
Jim Bishop
#80. What many men desire
that 'many' may be meant By the fool multitude that choose by show, Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach, Which pries not to th' interior, but like the martlet Builds in the weather on the outward wall, Even in the force and road of casualty.
William Shakespeare
#81. That is what's meant by being afraid of the future, by showing how brilliant you come out of it.
Bisco Hatori
#82. If you want to know what Jesus meant by what Jesus said, pay attention to that Jesus did.
Andy Stanley
#83. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually I gave the ropes control, and then I understood what he meant. By giving up control, I became free.
Olivia Cunning
#84. It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid.
Alan W. Watts
#85. Truth will never imprison you. Only the repression of your conscience will. This is what is meant by 'THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE'.
Suzy Kassem
#86. I think that when a film does its job, it poses questions rather than gives answers. It should act as a frustrating counselor who, at your bidding for advice, says, 'What do you think?' I think that's some of what the culture critic Greg Tate meant by art leaving a 'metaphysical stain.'
Aunjanue Ellis
#87. Maybe I could come over to your house again afterward and check on you? I raised my eyebrows to hint hint what I meant by checking on him.
With any luck his father would be as uninvolved and dismissive as he'd been tonight.Nick needed more yoga in his bedroom, and possibly a physical.
Jennifer Echols
#88. What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.
Franz Kafka
#89. Union with God is really possible. Unity with God I presume, is what is meant by Heaven, but that too is available in this life for the humble of heart.
Thomas Keating
#90. I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.
James Richardson
#91. We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.
Martin Jacques
#92. My father said, Don't grow up to be a woman, and what he meant by that was, a housewife ... without any interests.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#93. I'd often thought being a Christian meant by definition being a bad one, since nothing is more difficult than Christianity, so I was more or less used to that feeling.
Charlaine Harris
#94. I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.
Robert Frost
#95. One of our driving questions throughout this study will always be what these Christians meant by saying "Jesus is God." As we will see, different Christians meant different things by it.
Bart D. Ehrman
#96. What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.
Buck Henry
#97. What was she to think? Oh, teasing, teasing man! It would be so much easier if he could simply tell her what he meant by all his confusing actions. And so she had another shock: Jane Bennet was irritated with Mr. Bingley.
Elizabeth Adams
#98. The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.
Helene Deutsch
#99. Before we understood science, it was natural to believe that God created the universe, but now science offers a more convincing explanation." "What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is we would know everything that God would know if there was a God, but there isn't. I'm an atheist.
Stephen Hawking
#100. Reality is devoid of any intrinsic identity that can be captured by any one single proposition - that is what Buddha meant by "voidness."
Dalai Lama
