Quotes about the world
page 57

“I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Incubus Dreams

Source: Incubus Dreams

Guy, Thinking, Time

“When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

Sleep

“One thing I've learnt recently: how to think nothing. Here's the trick: don't have any interest in the world around you, don't have any hope for the future, and be warm.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Hope, Thinking, Future

“Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.”

John Fante book The Brotherhood of the Grape

Source: The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977)
Context: Nobody crossed him without a battle. He disliked almost everything, particularly his wife, his children, his neighbors, his church, his priest, his town, his state, his country, and the country from which he emigrated. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the sun or the stars, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.

Women, Hell, Universe

“Thus worshiping, serving, studying, praying, each in its own way squeezes selfishness out of us; pushes aside our preoccupations with the things of the world.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Way, Study, Selfishness

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

Pain, History, Nature, Sense

“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Source: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Idea

“Keep it, keep it!" I answered. "You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn't amount to anything—about everything I own in the world.”

Knut Hamsun book Hunger

Source: Hunger

“The secret is not to make your music louder, but to make the world quieter.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto: A Novel

Secret, Music

“I don't want the world. I want you.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“The world is made up of two classes - the hunters and the huntees.”

Richard Connell book The Most Dangerous Game

Source: The Most Dangerous Game

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

War, Thinking, Memory

“We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

“The best we can do then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

“Percy (to Annabeth): If I was going to pick one person in the world to reattach my head, I'd pick you.
Silena: Awww… Percy, that is so sweet!
Annabeth: Shut up, Silena.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Personality

“There are two kinds of girls in this world. The kind who breaks hearts and the kind who gets her heart broken.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Girl, Heart

“Laugh and the world laughs with you!”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Funny, Leadership, Relationship, For Men

“She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Imagination, Time, Waiting

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.”

Tom Schulman (1950) American film director, screenwriter

Source: Dead Poets Society

“Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it.”

Oswald Chambers book My Utmost for His Highest

Source: My Utmost for His Highest

Justice

“But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

God, Soul, Understanding, Help

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

This is the opening line of the novel. Sabatini used it as his epitaph.
Variant: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Source: Scaramouche (1921), Ch. I: "The Republican"

Sense, Laughter, Madness

“If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“Of course in the present day […] the world of work begins to become — threatens to become — our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 64–65
Source: Leisure: The Basis Of Culture

“I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.”

Jennifer Weiner book Good in Bed

Source: Good in Bed

People

“We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?”

Kate DiCamillo The Magician's Elephant

Source: The Magician's Elephant

Question, Change

“She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love

“Often-times it's madness, not genius that moves the world forward. Who else but the mad would reach so far, stretching for the impossible and, in so doing, prove the impossible possible!”

James Rollins Black Order

Source: Black Order

Time, Madness

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 4

Imagination

“I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Death, Imagination, Boy, Kiss

“In this world, there is a fine line between enlightenment and brain damage.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Antsy Does Time

“But I am dead certain--ba-dump-bump-ching--that I'm the first guy to lead an army of spirits in an assault from the spirit-world side… and had them start off screaming, "BOO!”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

Guy, Dead

“The most important single thing that any Latter-day Saint ever does in this world is to marry the right person, in the right place, by the right authority.”

Bruce R. McConkie (1915–1985) American Mormon leader

Personality

“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places”

Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash

Source: Snow Crash

“At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Love

“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”

George Bernard Shaw Mrs. Warren's Profession

Vivie, Act II
Source: 1890s, Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893)

People

“and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.”

John Fowles (1926–2005) British writer

“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

“… crazy world or maybe it's just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.”

Judith Guest Ordinary People

Source: Ordinary People

“That's the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: Weirdos From Another Planet: Calvin & Hobbes Series: Book Six: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Happiness

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

" The Round River: A Parable http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&entity=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile.p0655&id=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile&isize=XL" (c. 1940-48); Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 165. <br class="br">1940s

Education, Penalty

“It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Source: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“(Man in bar) Can you imagine a world without men? (Sylvia) No crime, and lots of happy, fat women.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, pp. 212-213

Women, Men, Happiness, Imagination

“The greatest thing a man can do in this world, is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.”

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Source: Learn to Expect a Great Deal of Life

Success

“A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

“That thing that looks like me but isn't? He'll burn down the world if Sebastian wants him to, and laugh while he's doing it. That's what you're saving, Clary.. Don't you understand? I'd rather be dead”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Understanding, Dead

“People don't change. There are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. Black and white. I don't know where gray fits in, or if you can even live in that shade.”

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

People, Change

“War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Men, War, Evil

“Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Books

“The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.”

Jon McGregor book If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Source: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

“The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.”

Charles Bukowski book Hollywood

Source: Hollywood

“You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not… No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

People, Home, Personality

“O brave new world that has such people in it.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

People

“When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

Source: Delhi

Star, Night

“How ironic is it to see a bumper sticker that says 'Jesus is the answer' next to a bumper sticker supporting the war in Iraq, as if to says 'Jesus is the answer - but not in the real world.”

Shane Claiborne (1975) American activist

War, Support

“Traitor!" Hera shouted. "You meddlesome, D-list goddess! You aren't worthy to pour my wine, much less rule the world.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Wine

“Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and there discovered was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.”

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

Books, Age, Freedom, Learning

“I will never give up… I will never give up! As long I'm still breathing in this world… As long I'm still standing, I will never give up!!!”

Hiro Mashima (1977) Japanese manga artist

“The world, right now, is only us.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

“The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.”

Ian McEwan book Saturday

Source: Saturday

“I know
it’s stupid to not own a gun yet have

so many triggers, but in some other world
gigantic seashells hold humans

to their ears and listen to the echo
of machines.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Stupidity

“I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Themes And Variations

“wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Four VII
is 5 (1926)

Wisdom, Fate, Fools, Spring

“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Life

“Parents. Honestly. Sometimes they really do think the world revolves around them.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

Source: Does My Head Look Big In This?

Thinking, Parent, For Parents

“It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

“But just as the river is always at the door, so is the world always outside. And it is in the world that we have to live.”

Gillian Rubinstein Tales of the Otori

Source: Across the Nightingale Floor

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

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

People

“There are enough cowards in the world without killing a brave creature for so little reason.”

Brian Jacques book Mossflower

Source: Mossflower

“I get tired of hearing it's a crummy world and that people are no damned good. What kind of talk is that? I know a place in Payette, Idaho, where a cook and a waitress and a manager put everything they've got into laying a chicken-fried steak on you.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

People, Cooking

“Calvin: From now on, I'm not doing anything I don't want to do! The world owes me happiness, fulfillment and success…. I'm just here to cash in.
p145”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat
Source: Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Happiness, Success

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 193

Courage, Question

“The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

History, Strong

“beleive in yourself and the world will be at your feet”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

“Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening.”

Michael Singer (1945) American landscape architect

Source: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

Life, Thinking

“If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.”

Gregory Maguire book Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Source: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 2 : Civilizations in History and Today, § 10 : Relations Among Civilizations, p. 51

Religion, Idea, Forgetting

“Maybe I'm wrong," Mom said. "Maybe the world really is coming to an end."
"Should I try Fox News?" I asked.
Mom shuddered. "We're not that desperate," she said.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

Moms

“Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Lets dedicate ourselves to what the ancient greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
Context: And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Life