Quotes about the world
page 46

“The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives”

Source: Stello

“I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“I asked them why when they persecute men, for religion or colour it was seen by the world as oppression and when they persecute women, it was dismissed as tradition.”

Emer Martin (1968) Irish writer

Source: Baby Zero

Women, Men, Religion

“Some times I think this whole world
Is one big prison yeard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards”

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

Thinking, Time

“There isn't so much love in the world that you can turn it away when it's offered.”

Robert Crais (1953) Novelist, screenwriter

Love

“A single rose can be my garden; a single friend, my world.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Friendship, Cute, For Friend, For Bestfriend

“If we make every attempt to increase out knowledge in order to use it for human good, it will make a difference in us and in our 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

Knowledge

“Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Flowers

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”

Guy De Maupassant book Suicides

"Suicides"

Life, Universe, Memory, Perfection

“In every message she spoke of birds, of flight, of the world away. Even back then, she flew against what was presented to her. I wanted to cling to her wings and soar, no matter how intimidated I was.”

Lisa See book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Source: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Bird

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Variant: I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.
Source: On the Road

Love, Pain, Girl, Time

“Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Baby

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Where we live in the world
is never one place. Our hearts,
those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us
moons before we are ready for them.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Source: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

Dogs, Heart

“One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Love, Feeling, Joy, Personality

“They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed.”

Ryū Murakami book Coin Locker Babies

Source: Coin Locker Babies

Thinking, Change

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Pain, Pleasure, Feeling, Animals

“This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

Bret Easton Ellis book American Psycho

Source: American Psycho

People

“Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

Beauty, Change, Past

“I took the life of the woman I was supposed to call mother in the process of being born… in order to become the world's strongest shinobi… an incarnation of sand was implanted inside of me…”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Life

“Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2001: A Space Odyssey

Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Star, Thinking, Waiting

“And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

People, Thinking

“Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Source: Cannery Row

“He knows that there's no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who's trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you're not bothered.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Way

“My heart shatters. My world shatters.

you will lose what you value most.

It wasn't my life or even Dimitri's life.

what you value most

It was his soul.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Variant: You will lose what you value most...

It hadn't been me that Rhonda was talking about. It hadn't even been Dimitri's life.

What you value most.

It had been his soul.
Source: Spirit Bound

Life, Soul, Heart

“Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto: A Novel

Life

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Helen to Milicent

Life, Truth, Youth, Idea

“It's always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph (2011)
Context: It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility. You can try to stop time, but it’s a complete waste of energy.

Life, Failure, Success

“What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 25

Hunger, Books, Understanding, Knowledge

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Personality

“The more I see of the world, the more am i dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistencies of all human.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Truth, Madness

“I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.”

Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

People

“Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Silence, Waiting

“In a world of unlimited possibilities, there is always the possibility that there are no possibilities.”

Margaret Weis (1948) American fantasy novelist

“I'm sorry your pretty little world got all screwed up, but everybody's does, and you go on. It's how you go on that defines you.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

“Yesterday, the president met with a group he calls the coalition of the willing. Or, as the rest of the world calls them, Britain and Spain”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

“I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Tear

“… the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Tree

“That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.”

Lev Grossman The Magician King

Source: The Magician King

Way

“Sometimes, you get no second chance and that its best to accept the gifts the world offers you.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Chance

“Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders.”

L. Frank Baum book Rinkitink in Oz

Source: Rinkitink in Oz

Truth, Understanding, Question

“Men were put into the world to teach women the law of compromise.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Women, Men, Law

“It's a full moon here tonight, which makes me think of you. Because, I know that no matter what I am doing or where I am, this moon will always be the same size as yours, half a world away.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Thinking

“And then the world exploded.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

“Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

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

Women, Men, Education, School

“The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love”

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

Love, Personality

“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Change, Time

“You're better equipped for this world than I am," she said. "I'm always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

Change

“We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Color, Thinking, Change

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”

Yōko Ogawa book The Housekeeper and the Professor

Source: The Housekeeper and the Professor

Children, Nature

“Being brave and self-confident doesn't necessarily start inside… It starts with the rest of the world, and it leads back to you.”

Sarah Dessen book Keeping the Moon

Variant: Being self-confident doesn't necessarily start inside. It starts with the rest of the world and leads back to you.
Source: Keeping the Moon

Confidence, Self-confidence

“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Books, Waiting, Reading

“As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.”

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

“The first time her laughter unfurled its wings in the wind, we knew that the world would never be the same”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Laughter, Time

“The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do.”

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

Address to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Boston, Massachusetts (30 July 1903), printed in "Account of the Boston Riot," Boston Globe (31 July 1903) http://web.archive.org/20071031084056/www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.7/html/235.html

“It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Way, Idea, Time

“Mom raised us to believe that every lie puts something out there in the world that's inevitably going to come back and bite you in the petunia.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

Lie, Moms

“There weren't any villains though. The world was just complicated in various ways, and there weren't any obvious villains to be found. It was excruciating.”

Tatsuhiko Takimoto (1978) writer

Way

“When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth, and tell the whole world 'No, You Move.”

J. Michael Straczynski (1954) American writer and television producer

Truth, Tree

“He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?”

Philip Pullman book The Subtle Knife

Source: The Subtle Knife

Women, Men, Way, Thinking

“Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Dreams, Personality

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris

“I guess it's a choice we make," she said.

"What's a choice?" I asked.

And she said, "How much of the world we let in.”

David Levithan book Love Is the Higher Law

Source: Love Is the Higher Law

“All I could think was that right there, in ever passing second, was the future winding itself own. 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

Thinking, Future

“I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

People, Season

“It is because good is always stronger than evil. Always remember that, Antonio. The smallest bit of good can stand against all the powers of evil in the world and it will emerge triumphant.”

Rudolfo Anaya book Bless Me, Ultima

Source: Bless Me, Ultima

Evil

“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”

Lucille Ball (1911–1989) American actress and businesswoman

Variant: Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. Your really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.

Love, Wise, Deep, Success

“The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”

Haruki Murakami book The Strange Library

Source: The Strange Library

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. VI: England and Italy.

People, Thinking

“Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.”

Kim Edwards book The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Book of Dreams (1961) Foreword
As misquoted in Night and Day (1989) by Jack Maguire, p. 221; Maguire does not cite his source, so this widely quoted variant appears to be an erroneous paraphrase of this published statement. It is not a direct quote from some other statement by Kerouac.
Variant: All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

Dreams, Night

“It's cold and it's winter and the world has gone to sleep”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

Sleep, Winter

“The Wonder of it All:
Sitting there in your pajamas & all the time in the world & if I could keep any moment it would be this: watching you & holding my breath with the wonder of it all.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Time

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall.”

Loretta Chase book Lord of Scoundrels

Source: Lord of Scoundrels

“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.”

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

War, History

“Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

Change, Personality

“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Books

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1780s, Letter to Peter Carr (1785)

Truth, Lie, Time, Heart

“See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Dreams

“Change your thoughts and you can change the world.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

As quoted in Back on Track : How to Straighten Out Your Life When It Throws You a Curve (1997) by Deborah Norville, p. 201
Variant: Change your thoughts and you change your world.

Change, Motivational, Wise, Success

“Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.”

Daniel Handler book Why We Broke Up

Source: Why We Broke Up

“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Parent

“We take everything for granted, but when I'm with Angeline, I see the world through new eyes. She makes my world better. It's why she's so great.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

“… along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”

David Abram (1957) American philosopher, ecologist

Source: The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Dreams, Imagination, Tree, Animals

“Of course I wasn't abused. If I were; things would be so simple. I'd have a reason to for being in a shrinks office. I'd have a justification and something to work on. The world wasn't going to give me something that tidy.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.”

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

Source: A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal, Volume 3

People, Books, Light, Time

“True love would look a second time. True love would not be thwarted. True love would not accept no for an answer. He would search the world and certainly look again and again in every cottage until he finds you.”

Alex Flinn (1966) American children's writer

Source: A Kiss in Time

Love, Search, Time

“A dream is the key that unlocks the mysteries of the waking world…”

Juliet Marillier (1948) New Zealand fiction writer

Dreams

“All my life I've felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged."
"Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Variant: Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. The difference in your case is that it's true.
Source: City of Bones

Life, Family, Feeling