Quotes about the world
page 43

“And only weaklings… who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose.”

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948) Novelist, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Feeling, Courage

“I left mad behind a long time ago. The world it is the way it is. I can only fix my little piece of it”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Way, Time, Madness

“The fire, baby. It'll burn us both. There's no place in this world for our kind of fire. My warrior woman. My valkyrie. You'll always be mine. Always. And never.”

Frank Miller book The Big Fat Kill

Source: The Big Fat Kill

Baby

“You can kid the world, but not your sister.”

Charlotte Gray (1948) Canadian historian

Sister

“By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Way, Reality

“The harder the world, the fiercer the honour.”

Steven Erikson book Memories of Ice

Source: Memories of Ice

“Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

People, Beauty, Grass

“Well, well, well," I said. "If it isn't the people responsible for unleashing Rose Hathaway on the world. You've got a lot to answer for.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

People

“I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. -- Stargirl”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

Love, Time

“Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Change

“The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

“For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

Life, Sea

“Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

Source: The Bell

Hope, Disappointment, Holiday

“Never would forever, with all its meanings, be so clear and distinct as in the true, guaranteed end of the world.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

“Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

Pain, Sleep

“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

People, Thinking, Sense, Parting

“They aren't the brightest crayons in the box
-Max(saving the world and other extreme sports)”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Sport, Box

“He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis)”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, God, Soul, Hell

“In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 32 
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
Variant: In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Context: The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Learning, Change

“Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Love, Way

“Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You're in with the former, but my God I don't envy the blood on your conscience.”

James Ellroy L.A. Confidential

Source: L.A. Confidential

Men, God, Envy

“A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.”

Agatha Christie book The Hound of Death

Source: The Hound of Death

Love, Law, Mother's Day, For Mother

“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Understanding

“The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

Source: How to Win Friends & Influence People

People

“Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden…”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

Intelligence

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Self-Help

Life, People

“It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Way, Thinking

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

People, Understanding, Thinking, Change

“Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Men

Source: Little Men

Life, Money, Business

“Should I pull on a shirt?" he asked with hint of amusement. I WILL NOT BLUSH. "No." He'd be doing the world a favor if he never wore a shirt again, but I wasn't going to tell him that part. "You're fine.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

Parting

“… Don't feel sorry for me. I'm glad I had a second chance in life like you said to be smart because I learned a lot of things that I never knew were in this world, and I'm grateful I saw it even for a little bit.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

Life, Feeling, Learning, Chance

“His eyes went soft and silver as she spoke. “Zhe shi jie shang, wo shi zui ai ne de,” he whispered.

She understood it. In all the world, you are what I love the most.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love

“How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world”

Louis De Bernières book Birds Without Wings

Source: Birds Without Wings

Change

“She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Feeling

“Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Light, Help

“I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Peace, Beauty, Thinking

“No one can create negativity or stress within you. Only you can do that by virtue of how you process your world.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.”

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

We Bereaved (1929)

Life, Pain

“It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Books, Music, Color, Bird

“I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there
At least not over half.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Ten Mills : Not All There
1920s, Further Range (1926)

God, Despair

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

Evil, Despair

“There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Children, Way, Effort

“He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“If you lower the ambient noise of your life and listen expectantly for those whispers of God, your ears will hear them. And when you follow their lead, your world will be rocked.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Life, God

“I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.”

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

Color, Cheating, Cry, Madness

“What I saw wasn't a ghost. It was simply--myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think?”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

Spring, Thinking, Night, Forgetting

“We cannot improve the world if we are conformed to the world.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

“Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy…. Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“A person's shadow stood for his legacy, his impact on the world. Some people cast hardly any shadow at all. Some cast long, deep shadows that endured for centuries.”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

People, Personality

“I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Source: The Seventh Seal

Dreams, Feeling, Heart, Indifference

“The trouble with you and me, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.”

Agatha Christie book Endless Night

Source: Endless Night

Dreams

“I loveI have loved ye from the moment I saw ye, I will love ye ’til time itself is done, and so long as you are by my side, I am well pleased wi’ the world.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Fiery Cross

Source: The Fiery Cross

Love, Time

“I changed the world; the world changed me.
Everything you do comes back to you. When you affect a situation, you are also affected.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Change

“I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite.”

John Donne book Holy Sonnets

No. 5, line 1
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Angels

“Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

People, Thinking

“Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.”

Edna O'Brien (1930) Novelist, memoirist, biographer, playwright, poet and short story writer

“We are missing Michael.
But we do know we had him, and we are the world.”

Maya Angelou book Letter to My Daughter

We Had Him (2009)
Source: Letter to My Daughter

“You must know that you are worth much to me whether you accomplish anything or not. Even if you are rejected in the world's eyes, you are valuable to me.”

Stormie Omartian (1942) American writer

Source: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing

“If we ruled the world, I guarantee you they never would have cancelled Firefly”

Jim C. Hines (1974) American writer

“The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

“Nothing exists in this world but me and my bed…” (p. 141).”

Banana Yoshimoto book Asleep

Source: Asleep

“If I could put my brain in her body, the world would be mine for the taking.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Match Me If You Can

“So I buy it. The most perfect little cardigan in the world. People will call me the Girl in the Gray Cardigan. I’ll be able to live in it. Really, it’s an investment.”

Sophie Kinsella book The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic

Source: Confessions of a Shopaholic

People, Girl, Perfection

“To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

God, Singing, Time, Night

“I think women rule the world, and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Rolling Stone interview (21 June 1984)

Women, Thinking

“Sometimes I get so caught up in my own problems that I forget how amazing the world is.”

Wendelin Van Draanen (1965) American writer

Source: Runaway

Problem, Forgetting

“All of us show many faces to the world. No one shows her true face all of the time. To do that would be dangerous, for what is seen can also be known.”

Cameron Dokey (1956) American writer

Source: The Wild Orchid: A Retelling of The Ballad of Mulan

Time

“One day soon you'll be in the world, and you'll have so many options you won't know what to do with them. Everyone will fall in love with you, because you're so beautiful and so charming, and you'll look back on high school as such a tiny blip.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Love, School, Beauty

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”

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

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Art
Variant: Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Source: Emerson's Essays
Context: Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

Beauty, Travel, Beauty

“I would have told her then she was the only thing that I could
love in this dying world but the simple word "love" itself already died and went away.”

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

Love

“Never thee stop believin' in th' Big Good Thing an' knowin' th' world's full of it - and call it what tha' likes. Tha' wert singin' to it when I come into t' garden.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden

Source: The Secret Garden

“The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

“A truth comes out when it must;
A dream comes true when it will.
Though the world turn to ash and dust
A secret’s a secret still.”

Sharon Shinn (1957) American science fiction writer

Source: The Safe-Keeper's Secret

Truth, Secret, Dreams

“He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.”

Jennifer Weiner book Good in Bed

Source: Good in Bed

Love

“All the bitchy girls in the world are just a training ground for what men can do to you.”

Sarah Dessen book Keeping the Moon

Source: Keeping the Moon

Men, Girl, Training

“The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Change

“Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Life, Feeling, Drawing

“Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.”

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

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Feeling, Reality

“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”

John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

“Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

Fools

“It is good to dress in fair clothes to dine with friends. It honors your host, if you are a guest; and your guest if you are a host. And both adorn the feast, and so celebrate the gifts of the world.”

Alison Croggon (1962) contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist

Clothes

“Like the Bible tells us, when a man will lay down his life for a friend, well, then there ain't no greater love in this here world than that.”

Bette Greene book Summer of My German Soldier

Source: Summer of My German Soldier

Love, Life

“Even if I’d been wide awake, I knew Dimitri would’ve taken my suitcase anyway. That’s how he was, a lost remnant of chivalry in the modern world, ever-ready to help others.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Help

“See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Memory

“Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle —
Why not I with thine?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Love's Philosophy http://www.readprint.com/work-1365/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1819), st. 1

Law

“It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

“Tonight the world is yours, as am I.”

Melissa de la Cruz book Revelations

Source: Revelations

“Here's the funny thing about the world coming to an end. Once it gets going, it doesn't seem to stop.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
Source: Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

Appearance

“We are different because our brain is wired differently. This causes us to perceive the world in different ways and have different values and priorities. Not better or worse - different.”

Allan Pease (1952) Australian motivational speaker

Way

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)
Context: There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

People, Books, Way