Quotes about the world
page 12
Source: East of Eden
Source: Moab Is My Washpot
Subject: Jane Goodall, primatologist and conservationist http://www.dailysummit.net/says/interview260802.htm, interviewed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002)
“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
(2021 rev. ed.), this quote was attributed to Wright in Art Spiegelman and Bob Schneider, Whole Grains: Book of Quotations (1973), but a similar quote was credited to Will Rogers in The Washington Post on May 17, 1964: "Tilt this country on end and everything loose will slide into Los Angeles."
Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_Yale_Book_of_Quotations/FtU4EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA906&printsec=frontcover New Yale Book of Quotations
“Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain”, p. 133.
This is a paraphrase of Thoreau: see explanation by the Walden Woods project http://www.walden.org/Library/Quotations/The_Henry_D._Thoreau_Mis-Quotation_Page).
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"
“I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.”
Source: The Black Obelisk
“The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.”
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream
“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.”
Source: The Taming of the Shrew
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
Interview in Playboy magazine (November 1975)
#124
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Source: Man and Superman
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”
Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)
Source: Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith
“Don't ask the world to change — you change first.”
"The Death of Me", p. 151
Awareness (1992)
Source: Awareness: Conversations with the Masters
Context: Don't ask the world to change — you change first. Then you'll get a good enough look at the world so that you'll be able to change whatever you think ought to be changed. Take the obstruction out of your own eye. If you don't you have lost the right to change anyone or anything. Till you are aware of yourself, you have no right to interfere with anyone else or with the world.
“That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
Source: 1Q84 (2009-2010)
As quoted in Think, Vol. 27 (1961), p. 32
Disputed
Spoken intro to "What a Wonderful World" (1970 version)
Context: Seems to me, it aint the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying.
Context: Some of you young folks been saying to me, "Hey Pops, what you mean 'What a wonderful world'? How about all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution? That aint so wonderful either." Well how about listening to old Pops for a minute. Seems to me, it aint the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying.
Source: understanding your potential discovering the hidden you
“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
Source: The Truth
“Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.”
Source: Evidence: Poems
“Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.”
“How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”
"Message from Bertrand Russell to the International Conference of Parlimentarians in Cairo, February 1970," reprinted in The New York Times (23 February 1970)
1960s
Context: The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was "given" by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.
Sometimes attributed to Audubon in recent years, there are no occurrences of this statement that have been located prior to 1997, and it is probably derived from the remarks of Wendell Berry:
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.
The Unforeseen Wilderness : An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971), p. 33
Misattributed
Source: La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)
Source: Sceptical Essays
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
These are paraphrases of Muir's quote from My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) - the actual quote is listed above: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." See Sierra Club explanation http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/misquotes.aspx.
Misattributed
Variant: Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.
Variant: When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.
“We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front
Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973) Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510. p. 248
1970s
Variant: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!”
“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
Source: The Lowland
Variant: That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 97.
Context: In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
“The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”
Said in conversation with Mrs. Alan Wood; quoted in Alan Wood's Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic (Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 236-7
1950s
“Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.”
Source: The Last Don
“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
“Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.”
“I think I need to avoid the world today. There’s no way I
can adult.”
Source: Firstlife
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
The Decisive Moment (1952), p. i; also in The Mind's Eye (1999)
Context: The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart. The objective of this joint operation is to depict the content of some event which is in the process of unfolding, and to communicate impressions. Sometimes a single event can be so rich in itself and its facets that it is necessary to move all around it in your search for the solution to the problems it poses — for the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving. Sometimes you light upon the picture in seconds; it might also require hours or days. But there is no standard plan, no pattern from which to work.
“To create one's own world takes courage.”
Variant: To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
Source: Kitchen
Optimism
Poetry quotes, Poems of Pleasure (1900)
Context: I find a rapture linked with each despair,
Well worth the price of anguish. I detect
More good than evil in humanity.
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes,
And men grow better as the world grows old.
Source: The Faraway Nearby
“Each of us has a unique part to play in the healing of the world.”
The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles (2012)
Source: The Law of Divine Compensation: Mastering the Metaphysics of Abundance
Source: The Prophecy Answer Book
“I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.”
“As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.”
The 2,000 Year Old Man (and sequels)
“Why should you love him whom the world hates so?
Because he love me more than all the world.”
“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”
Number 2 (as translated by Cliff Crego)
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.
(as translated by Annemarie S. Kidder)
Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) (1905)
Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Context: I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
Source: Letters to Vera
“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it”
Sec. 94
Source: Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be enter'd by degrees, as he can bear it; and the earlier the better, so he be in safe and skillful hands to guide him.
Source: A Streetcar Named Desire
Widely attributed to Emerson on the internet, this actually originates with "What is Success?” http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/emerson/Ephemera/Success.html by Bessie Anderson Stanley in Heart Throbs Volume Two (1911) edited by Joseph Mitchell Chapple.
Misattributed
“To be of use to the world is the only way to be happy.”
Source: To the Lighthouse