Quotes about the world
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“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

ABC TV (25 May 1958)

“The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

Life, People, Soul, Spring

“It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.”

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

Source: Drei Frauen: Ein Gedicht für drei Stimmen

Heart

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

2010s
Context: The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

Suffering

“I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

People, Fools, Moms, Thinking

“Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Tree

“The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Feeling, Universe

“There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Source: Books of Blood: Volume Two

“Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Love

“Defining relationships over here? I see that even as the world plunges into darkness and peril, you two stand around discussing your love lives. Teenagers.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Magnus Bane, to Clary Fray and Simon Lewis, pg. 61
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

Love

“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Feeling

“I love the Olympics, because they enable people from all over the world to come together and--regardless of their political or cultural differences--accuse each other of cheating.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies, But Some Actual Journalism!

Love, People, Cheating

“It does not matter where we come from or what we look like. If we recognize our abilities, are willing to learn and to use what we know in helping others, we will always have a place in the world.”

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

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Learning, Help

“I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

Smile

“You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, You're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right. I'm the witch. You're the world.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

Source: Into the Woods

“The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Sun Also Rises

“All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.”

Wally Lamb book She's Come Undone

Source: She's Come Undone

Truth, Dead

“I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Source: Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters

“How will the world change if we do not question it?”

Kate DiCamillo The Magician's Elephant

Source: The Magician's Elephant

Question, Change

“The world is full of places to which I want to return”

Ford Madox Ford book The Good Soldier

Source: The Good Soldier

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Life, Beauty, Nature

“Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Love, Life, Grass

“Julian said the world was evil and horrible - remember? But then he proved himself that it wasn't”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Kill

Evil

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,--you must have noticed them in the street,--how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

People, Clothes

“With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Cats, Universe

“Only in our darkest hour do we find the light. Humans are destructive by nature. The world is lacking balance. Terrors are beginning to triumph over the simple joys. Stand back and watch, because you're going to be here when we fall.”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (1984) Novelist

Nature, Light, Joy

“Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.”

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

Source: The Drawing of the Three

Understanding

“What she had long believed was not true, and now the world was wide open to discover what was.
It is like all my life I thought the sky was green.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Life

“And when her lips met mine, I knew that I could live to be a hundred and visit every country in the world, but nothing would ever compare to that single moment when I first kissed the girl of my dreams and knew that my love would last forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Love, Dreams, Girl, Kiss

“Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Love

“Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

Love, Beauty, Feeling, Beauty

“No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Understanding, Time, Past, Future

“In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370
Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Parting

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Source: Mrs. Warren's Profession & Others

People

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you're probably watching the wrong channel.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Cry

“The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.”

Justin Cronin The Passage

Source: The Passage

Dreams, Soul

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Heart

“How was it possible for the world to be so beautiful and so cruel at the same time?”

Gillian Rubinstein Tales of the Otori

Source: Across the Nightingale Floor

Beauty, Time

“The world fascinates me.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”

Toni Morrison book Tar Baby

Tar Baby (1981)

Life, Beauty, Painting

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

Source: A Primer Of Soto Zen

“I'm like everyone else in this stupid, bloody, amazing world. I'm flawed. Impossibly so. But hopeful. I'm still me.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Stupidity, Hope

“…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is different, and that’s ok…”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

Love, Life, Help

“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

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

1962, Address at Independence Hall
Context: Acting on our own, by ourselves, we cannot establish justice throughout the world; we cannot insure its domestic tranquility, or provide for its common defense, or promote its general welfare, or secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. But joined with other free nations, we can do all this and more. We can assist the developing nations to throw off the yoke of poverty. We can balance our worldwide trade and payments at the highest possible level of growth. We can mount a deterrent powerful enough to deter any aggression. And ultimately we can help to achieve a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion.

Help

“There are aspectsof this life-- of this world-- from which you can never walk away. Ever. The fact that almost everything you say to almost everyone you love for the rest of your life will be a lie is one of them.”

Ally Carter book Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

Source: Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

Love, Life, Lie

“The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Mathematics, Science

“How it felt to have the world moving beneath me, a hand gripping mine, knowing if I fell, at least I wouldn't do it alone.”

Sarah Dessen book What Happened to Goodbye

Source: What Happened to Goodbye

“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”

George Gordon Byron Don Juan

Source: Don Juan

Men, Truth

“only through new words
might new worlds
be called
into order”

Saul Williams (1972) American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor

Source: , said the shotgun to the head.

“There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“A positive attitude means all the difference in the world.”

Jenny Holzer (1950) American conceptual artist

“And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.”

Eva Ibbotson book A Countess Below Stairs

Source: A Countess Below Stairs

Music, Girl

“The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.”

Aleksandar Hemon The Lazarus Project

Source: The Lazarus Project

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”

Stanley Wolpert (1927–2019) American indologist

Source: Jinnah of Pakistan

History

“The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Cry

“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

Happiness

“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening (1899)

Appearance

“Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in
one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies”

Stephen Colbert book I Am America (And So Can You!)

Source: I Am America

Life, People, Parting

“I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: Sweethearts

“He had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O'Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Source: I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

“Happiest day of my life when my dad made him human. (Devyn)
Happy for you, bonebag…It cost me my girlfriend. (Vik)
It was a lamp, Vik, not a girlfriend. (Devyn)
I really loved that lamp. She lit up my entire world. (Vik)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Ice

Love, Life, Happiness

“Teachers don't just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.”

Charles Platt (1945) Author, journalist and computer programmer

People, Education, Understanding, Teachers

“Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known… then went crazy as a loon."

Lisa Simpson”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

Beauty, Solitude, Hurt

“Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

Source: American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

Books, Time

“To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: To Catch an Heiress

“No matter where it is in the sky… No matter where you are in the world… the moon is never bigger than your thumb. -John”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

Love

“It's just that I'm fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don't see how it's going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.”

Jonathan Maberry book Rot & Ruin

Source: Rot & Ruin

Life, Idea

“It's only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”

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

Comments on a passage in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) by Maurice Sendak, as quoted by Bill Moyers in "NOW with Bill Moyers", PBS (12 March 2004) http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html <br class="br">Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Source: Dreamtigers

Men

“The world hasn't changed that much; men still rule.”

Philippa Gregory book The Other Boleyn Girl

Source: The Other Boleyn Girl

Men, Change

“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Life, Age

“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Love, Family, Suffering, Loss

“Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Courage, Change

“Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Life, Evil

“When I was young, I asked my priest how to get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God told His children;'You are sheep among wolves, be wise as the serpent, yet innocent as doves.”

Dennis Lehane book Gone, Baby, Gone

Source: Gone, Baby, Gone

God, Children, Evil

“The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Truth

“When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you get a front row seat.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Archive of American Television http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/george-carlin, from one of Carlin's final interviews (2008) <br class="br">Interviews, Television Appearances <br class="br">Context: You know what, I said it this way: when you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks. And I'm a notebook kind of guy: [pretends to be taking notes] "Oh, my God, did you see that? Did you see what he just did?..." And I watch the freak show, and I kept my notes, and I make up stuff about it, and I talk about the freaks. And the freaks are all humans, and they are all like me, and we are all the same. I'm not better, I'm not different, I'm just apart now. I'm separate, I'm over here, because I put myself out of the mix. I don't have a stake at the outcome. I'm not a cheerleader for a given outcome now.