“The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses
Happy Thought.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
[Ashley, Montagu, Growing Young, Granby, Massachusetts, Bergin & Garvey, 1989, 120]
“The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses
Happy Thought.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician
Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 231
Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist
Game Is Not Over - 2005 Oxford Union Address http://www.jeclique.com/onoweb/news-oxfordjune2005.html
“We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?"”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer
But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.
"Is There A Beat Generation?" forum at Hunter College, New York, New York (8 November 1958)
“If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?”
Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist
Source: It's a Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection
John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician
Space (1912)
Context: How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.
Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer
The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: There is a point at which material things offer less than do some nonmaterial things. We ought to be able to live on a reasonable level and at the same time have others live on a reasonable level. Then we would not be afraid to work in our cities, we would not be at war with ourselves, which is characteristic of people in this country. If we were at peace with ourselves, we would be able to see other less material, but still quite rewarding, horizons. In The Greening of America, I did not mean that we would all become richer in material things, I meant that we would all become richer in the totality. I still think it is possible for that vision to become a reality.