Quotes about the world
page 11

“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me… I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Heart

“Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed….”

Yukio Mishima book The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Source: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

People, Sun

“We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

"A Community of the Free" address at the The Foreign Policy Association NY, NY (23 June 1976); this is often paraphrased: We cannot be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of the weapons of war.
Pre-Presidency
Context: Sometimes we try to justify this unsavory business on the cynical ground that by rationing out the means of violence we can somehow control the world’s violence. The fact is that we cannot have it both ways. Can we be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of the weapons of war?

War, Peace

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.”

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

Source: To His Coy Mistress (1650-1652)
Context: Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.

Time

“Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all?”

Dilgo Khyentse (1910–1991) Bhutanese Buddhist Lama

Source: The Hundred Verses of Advice: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on What Matters Most

Life, People, Beauty, Evil

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

“In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Truth

“My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Books, Understanding

“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 1, p. 17

Beauty, Laughter, Heart

“Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”

Max Frisch book Homo Faber

Source: Homo Faber (1957)

“There is no doubt that the princess did become a queen---not only on the screen. One of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses---and friends, in my life---but also in the later stages of her life, the UNICEF ambassador to the children of the world. The generosity, sensitivity, the nobility of her service to the children of the world and the mothers of the world will never be forgotten.”

Gregory Peck (1916–2003) American actor

Love, Life, Children, Intelligence

“Think… of the world you carry within you.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Thinking

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible….”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

People, Appearance

“It was one thing to snuggle a little when the world seemed about to end, and quite another to explain to her parents that she wanted to date an ancient magical horse.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Keys to the Demon Prison

Parent, Horse

“The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Variant: Mama, the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
Source: Sense and Sensibility

Love

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.”

Ian Stewart (1945) British mathematician and science fiction author

Source: Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

People, Understanding

“When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Thinking

“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. I, ch. 3, sect. 3
Source: The Quiet American (1955)

“The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

Sense

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

"When Death Comes"
New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

“People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

God, People, Fools, Thinking

“Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Prisoner of Heaven

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

Truth

“Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.”

Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer

Source: Time Cat

Books, Change, Reading

“… in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Invitation to a Beheading

Source: Invitation to a Beheading

Life, Dreams, Painting

“On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

February 28, 1840
Journals (1838-1859)

Life, Death, Fate, Confidence

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.”

William Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost

Source: Love's Labour's Lost

Women, Books, Art

“You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.”

Irvine Welsh book Filth

Source: Filth

Thinking

“I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the
world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Love, Hate, Fear, Dreams

“The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion… open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

Beauty, Color

“I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense…”

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) English children's writer and illustrator

Journal entry (1896-11-17), from the National Trust collection.
Source: The Complete Tales

Knowledge, Sense, Childhood

“The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings. It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike. It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Life, Suffering

“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Happiness, Happy, Life, Positive

“In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.”

Robert Kirkman (1978) American comic book writer

Source: The Walking Dead, Vol. 01: Days Gone Bye

Dead

“Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Courage, Evil

“It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have.”

Stephen King Storm of the Century

Source: Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world…”

Jean Rhys book Wide Sargasso Sea

Source: Wide Sargasso Sea

Beauty, Time

“When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

A New Earth (2005)
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Life, Sense

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”

Eugene O'Neill The Iceman Cometh

Source: The Iceman Cometh

Life, Truth, Lie, Dreams

“At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Books

“Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.”

Elena Ferrante book The Story of a New Name

Source: The Story of a New Name

Life

“By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Universe

“The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods… the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195).

If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.”

Carol Gilligan (1936) American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist

Source: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

Life, Dreams, Failure, Change

“Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Abide as the Self

Pain, Shoe

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

“The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

“It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book The Social Contract

Source: The Social Contract

Support

“I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.”

Nick Cave book The Death of Bunny Munro

Source: The Death of Bunny Munro

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Life, Learning, Help

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

52, Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekundiere der Welt. Aphorism 52 in Unpublished Works 1916-1918 http://www.kafka.org/index.php?unpub1916_1918 Variant translations: In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world. In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world. In the fight between you and the world, back the world. The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918) Variant: In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world.

“It is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Love, Forgiveness

“Don't go around thinking the world owes you a living. It was here first.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Misattributed Variant: Don’t believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. Source: Often attributed to Twain, but sourced to Robert J. Burdette, Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/06/world-owes/

Thinking

“How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

God, Soul, Boy, Parting

“God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil….”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964) Spanish writer

Life, God

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

Ross Macdonald (1915–1983) Novelist

Books, Past

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?

Money, Hunger, Children, Hope

“The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Prisoner of Heaven

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours

Love

“It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Books

“Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Happiness, Feeling, Suffering

“… of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.”

Yukio Mishima book Confessions of a Mask

Source: Confessions of a Mask

“We don’t do what we do for the glory or the fame or the credit; we do it for the quiet satisfaction of making the world a better place, saving the lives of innocents, and being better than you are.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Dark Days

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

People

“Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

People

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, the women together ought to be able to turn back and get it right side up again! and now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist

Ain't I a Woman? Speech (1851)

Women, Men, God, Strong

“What dark secrets do you keep hidden from the world? Where would you go if no one could find you? What would you do if no one could see you?”

P. C. Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

Secret

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. (Technically a misquote, but I like the misquote better)”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

“The world, we'd discovered, doesn't love you like your family loves you.”

Louis Zamperini (1917–2014) Italian-American middle distance runner

Source: Devil at My Heels

Love, Family, Family

“During our recent Human Rights Defenders Forum at The Carter Center, it was reported that between two hundred and three hundred children are sold in Atlanta alone each month! Our city is considered to be one of the preeminent human trafficking centers in the United States, perhaps because we have the busiest airport in the world and because, until recently, the penalty for someone convicted of selling another human being was only a $50 fine. A much heavier penalty of up to twenty years’ imprisonment can be imposed by the federal government, but only if there is proof that the trafficking took place across state lines. An analysis by Atlanta social workers found that 42 percent of the sexual exchanges they investigated were in brothels and hotel rooms in the most affluent areas of the city, while only 9 percent were in the poorer neighborhoods in the vicinity of the airport. Like Kara, they too conclude that the primary culprits are the men who buy sexual favors and the male pimps and brothel owners who control the women and garner most of the financial gains.”

Jimmy Carter book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power

Source: A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power

Women, Men, Children, Penalty

“I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world is still asleep.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

This derives from a comment about him written by Sigmund Freud, in Leonardo Da Vinci (1916): He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep.
Misattributed
Source: Leonardo's Notebooks

“The world must be peopled!”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

People

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto

Courage, Courageous

“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!”

William Shakespeare The Tempest

Variant: O, brave new world
that has such people in't!
Source: The Tempest

People

“I'm like everyone else—I see the world in terms of what I would like to see happen, not what actually does.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

“Float with me in the world of ether.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

“The world’s most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within you. The worst part is you can’t even tell who is who.”

Chetan Bhagat book 2 States: The Story of My Marriage

Variant: The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.
Source: 2 States: The Story of My Marriage

Parting, Personality

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Source: The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude, Perfection

“What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?”

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) English children's writer and illustrator

Childhood

“In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books, Dreams

“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Often abbreviated to: Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
Variant translation: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
Variant: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Context: We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.

Passion, For Men

“Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

People, Housing

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Stupidity, Optimism

“I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

“The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Der christliche Entschluss, die Welt hässlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt hässlich und schlecht gemacht.
Sec. 130
The Gay Science (1882)

“How silent lies the world
Within fair twilight furled,
Bringing such sweet relief!
A quiet room resembling,
Where, without fear or trembling,
You sleep away day's grief.”

Matthias Claudius (1740–1815) German poet

Fear, Sleep

“He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book The Lions of Al-Rassan

Source: The Lions of Al-Rassan

“The world is like that -- incomprehensible and full of surprises.”

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) Brazilian writer

Source: Gabriela, Clavo y Canela

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Not a Kerouac quote, but by Jon Krakauer, from his nonfiction book Into the Wild (1996).
Misattributed
Source: On the Road

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Variant: A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Truth, Lie, Shoe, Way

“The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Interview on London Plus (24 September 1984) - YouTube video http://youtube.com/watch?v=CR2N040drg0

Music, Business

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical, superficial — by this understanding.

Thinking

“and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

Love, Hate, Thinking

“Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer