Quotes about the world page 49
Ella Wheeler Wilcox book Poems of Passion
Solitude
Poetry quotes
Source: Poems of Passion
Context: Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.
“No, nothing can change my world
--Ichigo Kurosaki, Black Moon Rising”
Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist
“In our family, you don't get a childhood. We're too busy trying to dominate the world.”
Gordon Korman book The Emperor's Code
Source: The Emperor's Code
“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis
Source: On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"
Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer
Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
“I'd shut the whole world down just to tell you”
Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist
Source: Love Is a Mix Tape
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist
Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist
Source: Scientific Progress Goes "Boink": A Calvin and Hobbes Collection
“… the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”
Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Variant: I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
“the whole world is caught in her glance
and at last
the universe is
magnificent.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
“Why doesn’t the fattest man in the world become a hockey goalie?”
Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author
Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …
Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (1946) <br class="br">Context: What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
Charles Bukowski book Factotum
Variant: Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.
Source: Factotum
Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author
From Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, Volume VII, Number 2 (1984) http://www.missourireview.org/index.php?genre=Interviews&title=An+Interview+with+Stanislaw+Lem <br class="br">Context: For moral reasons I am an atheist — for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.
Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Source: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
1836
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)
Sarah Dessen book That Summer
Source: That Summer (1996)
Context: Maybe not, she said as we came to the car. But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works.
“If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.”
Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha
Source: Memoirs of a Geisha
“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“When the image is new, the world is new.”
Gaston Bachelard book The Poetics of Space
Source: The Poetics of Space
Gavin de Becker (1954) American engineer
Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
“It has been said that there is no such thing as coincidence in this world.”
Paulo Coelho book The Pilgrimage
Source: The Pilgrimage
Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead (1943).
Source: Atlas Shrugged
Context: That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I've never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
“Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.”
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer
Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth
Source: The Power of Myth (book), p.183
Context: Moyers: Unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.
Campbell: But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there's no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist
Song of Myself, 52
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
I, 4
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh
Context: For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. And then we fancy that the voices it utters and screams forth to us are nothing else but certain inarticulate sounds and noises, and not the several deprecations, entreaties, and pleadings of each of them.
“Two weeks to change the world, fourteen days to destroy it.”
Markus Zusak book The Book Thief
Source: The Book Thief
E. Lockhart book The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Source: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman
La plus grande chose du monde, c'est de savoir être à soi.
Book I, Ch. 39
Essais (1595), Book I
Source: The Complete Essays
“The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.”
Michel Houellebecq book Atomised
Source: The Elementary Particles
“it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful”
E.E. Cummings book Tulips and Chimneys
Tulips and Chimneys (1923) "in Just-"
“I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.”
Source: Lonesome Dove
“Falling in love should be the easiest thing in the world, but it's not.”
Rachel Hawthorne (1950) American author
Source: Full Moon
John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction
Variant: And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go.
Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
Michael Crichton book State of Fear
State of Fear (2004)
“The world of the dead wonʹt give you
up a second time.”
Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice
Source: Last Sacrifice
“If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.”
Susanna Kaysen (1948) American writer
Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist
Attributed in Psychology (1990) by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris, p. 372
1990s
