Quotes about the world
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“You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.”

Tim Gunn (1953) American actor and fashion consultant

Source: Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

Reading

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

Women, Men, Birthday, For Men

“If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women…”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Women, Men, Reality

“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“I don't want to put the world to rights… I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs.”

Lee Child book 61 Hours

Source: 61 Hours

People

“For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

Beauty, Change

“Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Love, Death, Beauty, Hope

“We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Subject: Jane Goodall, primatologist and conservationist http://www.dailysummit.net/says/interview260802.htm, interviewed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002)

People, Nature

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

(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

Angels

“When I look at small things, I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet… When I look at something too big, I want to die: the Diet Building, or a map of the world…”

Kóbó Abe book The Box Man

Source: The Box Man

Thinking

“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Life, People, Secret, Perfection

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Pain, History, Thinking, Reading

“I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.

I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond, that character—not wealth or power or position—is of supreme worth.

I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual's highest fulfillment, greatest happiness and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.”

John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) American business magnate and philanthropist

Love, Life, God, Hate

“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“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"

Life, Men, Peace, Mountain

“I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.”

Erich Maria Remarque book The Black Obelisk

Source: The Black Obelisk

Thinking, Time

“The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.”

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

Disease, Beauty

“It is not night when I do see your face,
Therefore I think I am not in the night;
Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company,
For you in my respect are all the world:
Then how can it be said I am alone,
When all the world is here to look on me?”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Thinking, Night

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.”

William Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew

Source: The Taming of the Shrew

“I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if…. if only there were no other people in the world.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

People, Sadness, Way, Heart

“When I was your age I knew nothing about the world or my place in it. I figured I'd be someone's wife, then someone's mother. It never occurred to me to be someone myself.”

Wendy Mass book Every Soul a Star

Source: Every Soul a Star

Age

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Interview in Playboy magazine (November 1975)

Life

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman

#124
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Source: Man and Superman

Dependency

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)
Source: Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

Beauty

“Don't ask the world to change — you change first.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

"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.

Change

“That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84 (2009-2010)

Memory

“If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

As quoted in Think, Vol. 27 (1961), p. 32
Disputed

Happiness, People, Happy

“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”

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

Way

“Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

Nature

“Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doing 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.”

Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) American jazz trumpeter, composer and singer

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.

Love, Secret, Chance, Baby

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Love

“You must decide if you are going to rob the world or bless it with the rich, valuable, potent, untapped resources locked away within you.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: understanding your potential discovering the hidden you

“I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

Terry Pratchett book The Truth

Source: The Truth

Truth, Lie

“If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Thinking, Country

“Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Evidence: Poems

Love, Forgetting

“Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Stupidity, Fear

“How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"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.

“There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Imagination, Evil, Madness

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

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

Hope, Music, Way, Feeling

“A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”

John James Audubon (1785–1851) American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter

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

Children

“Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later--no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget--we will return.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)

Books, Way, Thinking, Learning

“Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: Sceptical Essays

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

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.

Nature, Peaceful

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Change, Clothes

“We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

Love, Life

“No more words. We know them all, all the words that should not be said. But you have made my world more perfect.”

Terry Pratchett book Nation

Source: Nation

Perfection, Goodbye

“Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Soul, Business, Night

“We all do, kid. People have destructive impulses. Some of us want to see the world in ruins just for the fun of it… even if we're ruined along with it.”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

People

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

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.

“The point is, you have family and friends who love you. You have a world out there just waiting for you to conquer it. You have a life that will be anything you make it. That's the point.”

Malorie Blackman book Boys Don't Cry

Source: Boys Don't Cry

Love, Life, Family, Waiting

“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Feeling, Selfishness

“There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

History

“You had to deal every day with people who were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably improved if you gave them a slap.”

Terry Pratchett book Wintersmith

Source: Wintersmith

People, Thinking

“stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!”

Eve Ensler (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one.”

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Source: The Merchant of Venice

Sadness, Parting

“When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Call of Cthulhu

Source: The Call of Cthulhu

Star

“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Lowland

Source: The Lowland

“That the truest experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

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.

Freedom

“The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.”

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Source: An Ideal Husband

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

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

Happiness, Secret

“Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.”

Mario Puzo book The Last Don

Source: The Last Don

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Sleep, Evil

“Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. … The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

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

“If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

BBC obituary (2004)

“All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book Marina

Source: Marina

School, Thinking, Learning

“Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Sport, Fight

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”

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

People

“There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.”

Anne Rice book Servant of the Bones

Source: Servant of the Bones

Life, Beauty, Understanding

“In my crazy world, above all others… you were the only one who was the ugliest. And you were the only one… who was the most beautiful…. This is the unspoken truth.”

Kaori Yuki Japanese manga artist

Truth, Beauty

“Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.”

Jim Butcher book Vignette

Stupidity, Hell, Evil

“I think I need to avoid the world today. There’s no way I
can adult.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Firstlife

Way, Thinking

“Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

“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.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson book The Decisive Moment

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.

Search, Problem

“To create one's own world takes courage.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Variant: To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

Courage

“There are no 'if's' in God's world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety - let us pray that we may always know it!”

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

God

“I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Kitchen

Source: Kitchen

Change

“I detect
More good than evil in humanity.
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes,
And men grow better as the world grows old.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

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.

Love, Men, Hate, Light

“Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

Sea

“Each of us has a unique part to play in the healing of the world.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles (2012)
Source: The Law of Divine Compensation: Mastering the Metaphysics of Abundance

Parting

“No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.”

Ernest Cline book Ready Player One

Source: Ready Player One

Beauty

“true weanedness from the world don't consist in being beat off from the world by the affliction of it, but a being drawn off by the sight of something better.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Affliction

“It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.”

Katherine Paterson book Bridge to Terabithia

Source: Bridge to Terabithia

Beauty

“Jesus tells us to keep our eyes open so we are not fooled by the signs indicating that the End Times are near. As we get closer to the End Times, many people are going to claim to be the Messiah and claim to have the answers for a troubled world. Additionally, the book of Revelation tells us to expect a period of ceaseless, unending, terrible war. It appears that we are already preparing for this time as fifty percent of all research scientists today are involved in arms development and there is at least one military weapon and four thousand pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child on earth. Finally, there will be more and more disease and devastation. Today, as you read this, millions of people in the world are being afflicted by insufficient food, the spread of new diseases, and the devastating effects of natural disasters. As we get closer to the End Times, there will be more and more famine. There will also be an increase in earthquakes and natural disasters. Christ also spoke of pestilence: the spread of new diseases. Our world will experience a spate of tragic new diseases that we will be unable to control.”

David Jeremiah

Source: The Prophecy Answer Book

War, People, Books, Disease

“I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

“As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.”

Mel Brooks (1926) American director, writer, actor, and producer

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.”

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) English dramatist, poet and translator

Love, Hate

“…the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 7.

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”

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

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.

“Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Course of Love

Love, Pain, Hurt

“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”

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

Source: Letters to Vera

Love, Star

“Violence has never prospered, you can't remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

Fools, Change

“On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Tree

“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

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.

Knowledge

“When I was sixteen, I made the discovery -- love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me.”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

Love, Light

“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

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

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

Life, Children, People, Beauty

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

V.S. Naipaul A Bend in the River

Source: A Bend in the River

Men

“To be of use to the world is the only way to be happy.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

Happiness, Way

Quotes about the world page 12

Quotes about the world
page 12