Quotes about the world
page 38

“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Love, Making love, Joy

“I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Parent, Falseness

“It is important for people to know that no matter what lies in their past, they can overcome the dark side and press on to a brighter world.”

Dave Pelzer (1960) American author

Source: A Child Called "It"

People, Past

“The result is… that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.”

Fritz Leiber Heroes and Horrors

Source: Heroes and Horrors

“Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Men, Hate

“There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Hope

“Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Help, Heart

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

Thomas Keneally book Schindler's Ark

Source: Schindler's List

Life

“Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”

Orson Scott Card book Children of the Mind

Source: Children of the Mind

Happiness, Books, Change, Heart

“Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.”

Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: The Rosy Crucifixion II: Plexus (1953), p. 599

School

“But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People, Time

“We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Source: Rabbit Redux

“The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us.”

Chetan Bhagat (1974) Indian author, born 1974

Personality

“I never did learn how to live in the moment, but I did learn that moments could be wasted and the world would continue to spin on its axis.”

Eloisa James (1962) American academic

Source: Paris in Love

Learning

“I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Cry

“Most people in the world are Christ lovers. And then there are Christ haters. But all of them are fixated on Christ, and he perpetuates for ever.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

People, Lovers, Christ

“What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.”

Albert Pike (1809–1891) Confederate States Army general and Freemason

"1860. In Lodge of Sorrow at Washington: March 30.", p. 11 
In sentiment this is similar to the expression made much earlier by Giordano Bruno in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584) : "What you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own."
Ex Corde Locutiones: Words from the Heart Spoken of His Dead Brethren
Variant: What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.

“There are only four points of warmth and brightness, in the whole world, that burn fiercely enough for me to feel something like the person I was. Your mother, your father, Lucie, and you. You love, and tremble, and burn.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Nothing but Shadows

Love, Feeling, Personality

“The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.”

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Variant: The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Fight, Beauty

“If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.”

Mercedes Lackey (1950) American novelist and short story writer

“If you conquer yourself, then you conquer the world”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

Peaceful

“Everyone in the world worth being nice to. Because God never creates inferior human beings, each person deserves respect and dignity.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

God, Personality

“Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.”

Haruki Murakami book Dance Dance Dance

Source: Dance Dance Dance

Death, People, Way, Suicide

“If you are a woman, if you are a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, The Notorious C.H.O. Tour
Context: “And I have a lot of self-esteem, which is amazing, because I’m probably somebody who wouldn’t necessarily have a lot of self esteem as I am considered a minority and if you are a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless. You know, when you look in the mirror and think, ‘Ugh, I'm so ugly, I'm so fat, I'm so old.’ Don't you know that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising. Magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself, so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around crème that doesn't turn around shit. If you don't have self-esteem, you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you want to go for. You will hesitate to ask for a raise. You will hesitate to call yourself an American. You will hesitate to report a rape. You will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote; you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue.

Intelligence, Personality

“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.”

A.E. Housman Last Poems

Source: Last Poems

“You don't have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”

Haruki Murakami book The Elephant Vanishes

Source: The Elephant Vanishes

“There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Music

“Do the people in Australia call the rest of the world 'Up Over'?”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

People

“When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity… you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Life, Feeling, Nature, Envy

“The universe is the way it is, whether we like
it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent
of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh
or pointless, but that alone doesn ' t require God to actually exist.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (1954) American physicist

Source: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

God, Way, Universe

“Women are delicate creatures. Fragile. Gentle. Made by God to be sheltered from the harshness of this world..

Morgan MacDonnell”

Teresa Medeiros (1962) American writer

Source: A Whisper of Roses

Women, God

“Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a Book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Books, Cars

“[…] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

“It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start”

Ron Rash book Serena

Source: Serena

Tear, Baby

“There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Beauty, Light, Waiting, Summer

“It is not often that the real world conjures worse than what we can imagine.”

Alison Goodman (1966) Australian science-fiction writer

Source: Eona: The Last Dragoneye

Imagination

“At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God

Time

“Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

“I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.”

Christopher Pike book The Last Vampire

Source: The Last Vampire

“I have a large seashell collection which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen it.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

I Have A Pony (1985)

“A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons, it does not bring us into a smaller world full of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Faith, Mountain

“Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses

“The world needed more fireworks- especially now that there was going to be a shortage of beautiful, useless things.”

Scott Westerfeld book Specials

Source: Specials

Beauty

“To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Color

“To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat.”

Joyce Cary book The Horse's Mouth

Source: The Horse's Mouth

Wisdom, Forgiveness, Heart, Forgetting

“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”

Aleksandar Hemon The Lazarus Project

Variant: All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.
Source: The Lazarus Project

People

“I'm not afraid of the world. I'm afraid of a world without you.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”

Steven D. Levitt (1967) American economist

Source: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

People, Way

“I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: The Reader's digest vol. 140, no. 837-842 (1992), p. 159

Failure, Strong, Success

“Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into light.”

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

Faith, Light, Faith

“When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Nature

“Death, especially violent death, will turn the meanest bastard in the world into a nice guy. Why is that?”

Laurell K. Hamilton book The Laughing Corpse

Source: The Laughing Corpse

Death, Guy

“Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.”

Reynolds Price (1933–2011) American writer

Life, Heart

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“That's the trouble with having the whole world love you. One day, you wake up and it's flirting with your best friend instead. And you don't know what to do. You're thrown.”

Sophie Kinsella book Shopaholic Abroad

Source: Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Love

“Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

History

“If you would have your son to walk honourably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them — not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. III : A Controversy; Gilbert to Helen

Learning

“quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking.”

Gregory Maguire (1954) Novelist

Source: What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy

People, Way, Quotes, Thinking

“Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Re: United States Committee for UNICEF (25 July 1963); Box 11, President's Outgoing Executive Correspondence Series, White House Central Chronological File, Presidential Papers, Papers of John F. Kennedy http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx <br class="br">1963

Children, Hope, Future, Hope

“And I’d say to myself as I looked so lazily down at the sea:
“There’s nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

Source: The World of Winnie-the-Pooh

Sea

“There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Source: Cash

Way, Loss

“It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole

Way, Heart

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book The Guns of August

Source: The Guns of August

History, Sun

“I shall take the heart. For brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
Context: "All the same," said the Scarecrow, "I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one."
"I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman; "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world."

Happiness, Heart

“We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Reality, Drawing

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Books, Light, Reading

“When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Blue Pastures

“Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there…a clock without a craftsman.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Solipsist

Life, Feeling, Thinking, Waiting

“There had never been a shortage of fools in the world”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

Source: The Drawing of the Three

Fools

“The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

Norbert Wiener book God & Golem, Inc.

Source: God & Golem, Inc. (1964), p. 69
Source: The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society
Context: [T]he future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

Lie, Intelligence, Waiting, Future

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

“Bye-bye. I'm off on a journey to the real world. 'Cause within this meta-reality what'sis this - my death.”

Natsuo Kirino book Real World

Source: Real World

Death, Reality

“My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Dependency, Personality

“You might not believe it… but you make the world a better place when you smile.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Guardian

Variant: The world is a better place when you smile
Source: The Guardian

Smile

“Beneath the makeup and behind the smile I am just a girl who wishes for the world.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Smile, Girl

“The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Source: The Impossible Knife of Memory

Life, People, Family, Sex

“One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world.”

Anne Rice The Tale of the Body Thief

Source: The Tale of the Body Thief

“Many strange things happen in this world”

Johanna Spyri book Heidi

Source: Heidi

“It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.”

Cormac McCarthy The Sunset Limited

Source: The Sunset Limited

Education, Personality

“Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: A History of Reading

Books

“Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

Way, Personality

“But there is one thing you must remember, if you forget all else. There is no good or evil, save in the way you see the world. There is no dark or light save in your own vision. All changes in the blink of an eyelid; yet all remains the same.”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

Way, Light, Evil, Change

“It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Source: How to Be Good

Family, Time, Reading

“The world is a wheel. When we rise or fall, we do it together.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.”

Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) Scottish writer, cultural commentator, raconteur and nationalist

Love

“As small as a world as large as alone.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

"maggie and milly and molly and may" in Complete Poems: 1904-1962
Variant: may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
Context: milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

“When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?” (…)
A sigh of longing. “To be honest, I wanted to be ruler of the entire world. Or the ruler’s trophy wife.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Surrender