Quotes about the world
page 49
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.
Source: The Secret Life of Bees
“No, nothing can change my world
--Ichigo Kurosaki, Black Moon Rising”
“In our family, you don't get a childhood. We're too busy trying to dominate the world.”
Source: The Emperor's Code
“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
Source: On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"
Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
“I'd shut the whole world down just to tell you”
Source: Love Is a Mix Tape
Source: Scientific Progress Goes "Boink": A Calvin and Hobbes Collection
“… the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”
Variant: I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
“the whole world is caught in her glance
and at last
the universe is
magnificent.”
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?”
Source: 13 Gifts
Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (1946)
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.
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
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
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.
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 93
The Old King, p. 22.
Source: The Alchemist (1988)
Source: The Power of Myth
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Source: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
1836
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)
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.”
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!”
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
“Remake the world, a little at a time, each in your own corner of the world.”
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.”
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.”
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.
Source: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
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.”
Source: The Elementary Particles
“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.”
Source: Full Moon
Source: Ender's Game
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
“If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.”
Attributed in Psychology (1990) by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris, p. 372
1990s
Source: Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland
Source: Shadowlands