To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
Jane Austen

Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.
Jane Austen

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
Thomas A. Edison

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
George Orwell

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
George Orwell

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
George Orwell

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
George Orwell

For among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible; which is one of those disgraceful things which a prince must guard against.
Niccolo Machiavelli

Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that's more productive.
Donald Trump

Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
Robert Kennedy

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
William Osler

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
T. S. Eliot

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."
T. S. Eliot

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.
T. S. Eliot

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.
Lord Byron

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.
Lord Byron

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
Lord Byron

Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.
Lord Byron

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart