Quotes about the world
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“To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.”

William Nicholson movie Shadowlands

Source: Shadowlands

God, Pain, Dreams, Way

“I can't believe he took you to an actual resteraunt. I assumed his idea od a date would be making you watch him play World of Warcraft with his nerd friends.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Idea

“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

Parting

“Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.”

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

“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“That proves you are unusual," returned the Scarecrow; "and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

People, Tree

“We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.”

Ben Okri The Famished Road

Source: The Famished Road

God, Dreams

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Age, Heart

“Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

“I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.”

Stephen King book The Eyes of the Dragon

Source: The Eyes of the Dragon

Friendship, Feeling, Flowers, Thinking

“In those days, we finally chose to walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong with love
And there may be many things we forget in the days to come,

But this will not be one of them.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Traveling Light: Stories & Drawings for a Quiet Mind

Love, Strong, Forgetting

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

People, Books

“If God wanted a world filled with saints, He never would have created adolescence.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer The Dead and the Gone

Source: The Dead and the Gone

God

“if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. it's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests he did not create a single leaf the same as another.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

God, Law, Nature

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”

Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates

Source: Deadhouse Gates

Children, History

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”

Ivan Illich book Deschooling Society

Source: Deschooling Society

Age, School, Religion

“When the world moves forward too fast for some people, they try to pull us all back with their fear.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

People, Fear

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.”

John Muir book A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 6: Cedar Keys, page 160
Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

Support

“It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light

Source: A Ring of Endless Light

Love

“There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality - a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.”

Rhonda Byrne (1951) Australian writer and producer

Source: Hero

Beauty, Suffering, Joy

“when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows

Heart, Sea

“We sat in the car
& the night dropped
down until the
only sounds were
the crickets &
the dance of our voices

& for a moment
the world became
small enough to
roll back & forth
between us.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Hearing Voices - Volume 5: Collected Stories and Drawings

Cars, Dance, Night

“I'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesn't.”

Dean Koontz book Relentless

Source: Relentless

Water, Baby

“There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

People

“And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

The Irresistible Revolution (2006)
Source: The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

People, Way, Lovers, Thinking

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.”

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

Life, Color, Mood, Painting

“My mind… It's who I am. I think I'd rather suffer any other injury in the world than have my mind tampered with.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Thinking, Suffering

“For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Hell

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Way, Thinking, Sense

“There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding out what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 10: "Conversation", p. 157

Secret

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

International Herald Tribune (21 February 1990)

Heart

“America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"September,", p. 413
1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)
Context: This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Context: If the current polls are reliable... Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

Money, Cars

“Ka works and the world moves on.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: Wolves of the Calla

“All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Memory

“If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”

Christopher Isherwood book A Single Man

Source: A Single Man

Time

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Dreams

“I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.”

Carl Sagan book The Demon-Haunted World

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 11 : The Dragon in My Garage, p. 180
Source: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Context: I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

Understanding, Thinking

“I think I'm a bit in love with these girls. They make me feel giddy. Like I haven't a care in the world. Like I'm fearless.

Like I used to be.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Saving Francesca

Love, Feeling, Girl, Thinking

“Really, according to the shrinks, I am angry at everyone ever. Especially them.

I am all anger and resentment all the time.

Not one of them has ever suggested that maybe I lie because the world is better the way I tell it.”

Justine Larbalestier (1967) Australian young-adult fiction author

Source: Liar

Lie, Way, Time, Anger

“She was his north star, the fixed point round which his world turned. For as long as his heart beat, or hers, he believed they would always share a destiny.”

David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy

Source: Fall of Kings

Star, Heart

“The world is speaking to you every day, you just don't know how to listen.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Soul, Tree, Christmas, Dead

“We do not realize the sound the world makes -- unless, of course, it comes to a stop. Then, when it starts, it sounds like an orchestra.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

“Cruelty never helped the turning of the world.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Help

“He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

People

“There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Speech http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/index.html at Digital Biota 2 http://www.cyberbiology.org/, Cambridge, UK, (1998) <br class="br">Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency <br class="br">Context: There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

“… the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Way, Nature

“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”

Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace

Source: Alias Grace

“Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

Source: Among Others

“It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”

Ken Kesey book Kesey's Garage Sale

Source: Kesey's Garage Sale

“In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

God

“If it's to protect our family, be it the Kingdom or the entire world… We would make anyone our enemy! That's what it means to be Fairy Tail!!”

Hiro Mashima (1977) Japanese manga artist

Family

“He offered her the world. She said she had her own.”

Monique Duval (1924–2014) Canadian journalist

“We passed hieroglyphic scrolls, gold jewelry, sarcophagi, statues of pharaohs, and huge chunks of limestone. Why would someone display a rock? Aren't there enough of those in the world?”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“All we can go on is what we think, how we see the world. If you can't trust your own mind what can you trust?”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Thinking

“When we're identified with Awareness, we're no longer living in a world of polarities. Everything is present at the same time.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Time

“I’ve heard people say that the hardest thing in the world is to live with someone you don’t love. But I’ve always thought it would be far more difficult to live with someone who doesn’t love you.”

Amanda Stevens (1977)

Source: The Kingdom

Love, People

“Everything changes in my life, and the world stays the same.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Life, Change

“The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Antarctica

Source: Antarctica

Idea, Time

“Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?”

Pamela Dean Tam Lin

Source: Tam Lin

Art, Reading

“I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,
And now the whole world is here for me to see,
Now I'm searching for my love to be.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Room Full Of Mirrors
Song lyrics, Rainbow Bridge (1971)
Context: I used to live in a room full of mirrors,
All I could see was me.
Then I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,
And now the whole world is here for me to see,
Now I'm searching for my love to be.

Love, Search