Quotes about the world

page 59

“I do regard her as one who is too modest for the world in general to be aware of half her accomplishments, and too highly accomplished for modesty to be natural of any other woman.”

“Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?”

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”

“It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.”

“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.”

“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?”

“Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.”

“Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.”

“Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.”

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”

“I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.”

“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.”

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.”

“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”

“A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”

“I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.”

“I'm on such a dangerous road, Milena. You're standing firmly near a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes subduing with their radiance the suffering world.”

“I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.”

“All around the world, we are gazing skyward waiting for God…
Never realizing that God is waiting for us.”

“In fact I was fairly certain there was no one in the entire world quite like Adrian Ivashkov.”

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.”

“But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”

“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

“Mama says that satisfaction isn't what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?
I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

“Bugger this. I want a better world.”

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

“Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”

“Jason decided there was nothing in the world scarier than a gang of bat-wielding grannies.”

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

“Think about yourself at least once in your life otherwise you may miss the best comedy in this world.”

“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”

“I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.”

“Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”

“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.”

“She couldn't survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern.”

“Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?”

“When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.”

“To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.”

“Rene looked at Grendel. “What in the world is that?”
“That’s our mutant attack poodle,” I told her.
“Is he chewing on a gun?”

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

“Now is a time for change, a time to become the greatest version of yourself. And a time to to make your grandest vision of the world.”

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.”

“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”

“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.”

“What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.”

“Example moves the world more than doctrine.”

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”

“When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.”

“The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.”

“There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.”

“God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”

“Just in case the world ends tomorrow," she said. "We might as well enjoy today.”

“I’m the god of funerals. I know every death custom in the world—how to die properly, how to prepare the body and soul for the afterlife. I live for death.”
“You must be fun at parties,” I said.”

“It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.”

“In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.”

“I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

“The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”

“He'd burn the whole world down til he could dig out you of the ashes.”

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

“Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.”

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.”

“Despereaux," she whispered.
And then she shouted it, "Despereaux!"
Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.
Nothing.”

“As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.”

“For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”

“He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again.”

“In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.”

“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

“We will K‘Vruck the world.”

“She had to go on this quest. The fate of the world might depend on it. But part of him wanted to say: Forget the world. He didn’t want to be without her.”

“If I can learn to understand this language without words, I can learn to understand the world.”

“In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.”

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

“She had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand between Will and the world, protecting each one of them from the other.”

“That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.”

“I was thanking him for… well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.”

“If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.”

“As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.”

“The truth is, the world isn't easy for any of us. It never has been and it never will be.”

“I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.”

“The world isn't fair, Calvin."
"I know Dad, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?”

“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”

“There are 3 reasons for why you can't beat me. First, I'm better looking than you are. Second, your blows are too light. And third, there's nothing in the world I can't tear up.”

“A world without you is unknown to me. I don't even know if it exists.”

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”

“Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"

"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.”

“I have always been a romantic; one of those who believes that a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the world.”

“I begin with the young. We older ones are used up but my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at all these men and boys! What material! With you and I, we can make a new world.”

“There is no place so dangerous as a world without magic.”

“The world is Trouble… and Grace. That is all there is.”

“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.”

“She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.”

“One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.”