Quotes about the world
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“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Source: On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Works of Love

Source: Works of Love

Love, Beauty

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" God's Grandeur http://www.bartleby.com/122/7.html", lines 1-4 <br class="br">Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

God

“The world began in hazard and will end in it.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

“There is nothing stronger in this world than gentleness.”

Han Suyin (1917–2012) physician and author

“And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

Waiting

“Man moves in a world that is nothing more or less than his consciousness objectified.–Neville Goddard”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

“Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world?”

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

Source: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Happiness

“No, he wasn't a pig. He was a lonely, hurt man who didn't know how to cope in a world that had turned its back on him. [Astrid]”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Hurt

“… most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

People, Thinking

“Christ entered our world. As a result, we can enter His.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: God Came Near

Christ

“I wanted to talk to someone. But who? It’s moments like this, when you need someone the most, that your world seems smallest.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

Weather

“Right now, America looks like a fatheaded, shortsighted, gas-guzzling arrogant blowhard to the rest of the world.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Final Warning

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Truth, Singing, Painting

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

“There is so much more to this world then outward appearances. Our society basks in the illusion of normalcy every day, and hides from the truth every night.”

Amber Benson (1977) actress from the United States

Source: Accursed

Truth, Appearance, Night

“Statistically speaking, there's a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Chance, Parting

“There.” She tossed her hair back while he stared at her. “The sky did not fall, the world did not end, neither of us was struck by lightning or beamed straight to hell. I’m not your damn
sister, Delaney. That ought to make it clear.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Savor the Moment

Hell, Sister

“Should the whole frame of Nature round him break,
In ruin and confusion hurled,
He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
And stand secure amidst a falling world.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Translation of Horace, Odes, Book III, ode iii.

Nature

“There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Music, Color, Sea

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

People, Law

“Most people do not see the world as it is. They see it as they are”

Margaret Landon (1903–1993) writer, missionary

People

“There wasn't a woman alive who could resist a man who paid attention to her, who made her feel like she was the only other person in his world.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: A Dark Kiss of Rapture

Feeling, Personality

“It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.”

Pat Barker (1943) British writer

Pain

“once you laugh at you own weaknesses, you can move forward. Comedy breaks down walls. It opens up people. If you're good, you can fill up those openings with something positive. Mabye…….. combat some the ugliness in the world.”

Goldie Hawn (1945) American actress, film director, and producer.

People

“My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Books, Sadness, School, Parent

“Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.”

Robert Henri book The Art Spirit

Source: The Art Spirit

Way

“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Education, Girl

“What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.”

Mark Vonnegut (1947) American physician and writer

People, Books, Imagination, Reading

“Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Stupidity

“Do a little bit of good wherever you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Variant: Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

“What God says is best, is best, though all the men in the world are against it.”

John Bunyan (1628–1688) English Christian writer and preacher

Source: The Pilgrims Progress

Men, God

“Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Soul, Bird

“I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Star, Sun

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

As quoted in Plain Speaking : An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman (1974) by Merle Miller, p. 26

History

“You’re not dead,
but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia,
caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beat-
ing heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me.
I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Variant: You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.
Source: Wintergirls

Heart, Dead

“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”

Maud Hart Lovelace book Betsy-Tacy and Tib

Source: Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941), p. 4

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3

Love, Children, People, Books

“You have to find what sparks a light in you so that you in your own way can illuminate the world.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Way, Light

“Through imagination, we can visualize the uncredited worlds of potential that lie within us.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Lie, Imagination

“He came into the world like a delivery that no one knew what to do with, and nobody wanted to sign for.”

Obert Skye book Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo

Source: Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo

“I don't need anything else. I get out of bed every morning and face the world because you're in it.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.”

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

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love, Heart Touching, Mother's Day, For Parents

“The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Source: Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

Soul, Imagination, Thinking

“I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent.

“This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn’t want to forget a single one.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Goodbye Tsugumi

Source: Goodbye Tsugumi

Forgetting

“Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Source: Role Models

Hunger, Pleasure, Youth

“Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves.”

Christopher Moore book A Dirty Job

Source: A Dirty Job

“A fickle heart is the only constant in this world”

Diana Wynne Jones book Howl's Moving Castle

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

Heart

“In the real world
as in dreams
nothing is quite
what it seems.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Books, Dreams

“A part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and-no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-unable quite to let each other go.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

Fear, Parting

“It sounded artificial, like a beauty pageant contestant pledging world peace. I did feel sad, but articulating it seemed cheap to me.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

Sadness, Peace, Beauty, Feeling

“He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Variant: Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 25
Context: While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier... and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

Hurt

“By understanding the nuances of the world around you and how to survive the temptations, you can rule anything. Even yourself”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Understanding

“There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”

James Baldwin book Go Tell It on the Mountain

Source: Go Tell It on the Mountain

People

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

“Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.”

Jürgen Moltmann (1926) German Reformed theologian

Nature

“But it's not the name I'd give to a conqueror of worlds… I would've gone with Thundro or Ragnor. I might just call him Thundro anyway.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Shadow Heir

“Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

“Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.”

David Sedaris When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Source: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Time

“I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.”

Leonard Cohen book Beautiful Losers

Source: Beautiful Losers

Reading

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Travel, Home, Search, Family

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.”

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

Deep, Friendship, Relationship, For Friend

“If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

God, Time

“We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

Idea, Success

“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Life, Learning, Time

“My world was changing, and I was not ready for it.”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

Change

“His hands are off," Gabrielle pointed out.
"Posture's wrong," Kat said.
"He's still… hot," Gabrielle said, as if it were the greatest insult in the world.
"I feel so objectified. So… cheap," Hale told them.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Feeling

“Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Life, Time

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change”

Isabel Allende book The House of the Spirits

Variant: Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.
Source: The House of the Spirits

Fear, Reality, Change