Quotes about the world
page 6

“I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.”

Source: From Beyond

“Believe me, I know what it's like to feel all alone… the worst kind of loneliness in the world is isolation that comes from being misunderstood, it can make people lose their grasp on reality. - Sienna Brooks”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

People, Feeling, Reality, Loneliness

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Mr. Dumby, Act III
Variant: There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Source: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

“There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Christmas, Funny, Christmas

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Variant: If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Funny

“I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Men

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Past

“The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger coincide.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Wishful Thinking, p. 95
Variant: Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

Hunger, God

“And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.”

Lois Lowry book Number the Stars

Source: Number the Stars

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Truth, Lie, Courage, Parting

“Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality
itself.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

Reality

“What matters is not to know the world but to change it.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

Change, Motivational, Back To Work

“People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

People, Thinking

“The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Pain, Feeling, Understanding, Hurt

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Time

“The world know it not; but you, Autumn, I confess it: your wind at night-fall stabs deep into my heart”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: The Tale of Genji

Autumn, Heart, Night

“The real world is where the monsters are.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

Clarice Lispector book The Passion According to G.H.

Source: The Passion According to G.H.

Silence

“Well, I'd love to wear a rainbow everyday and tell the world that everything's okay / But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back / 'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Source: Man in Black

Love

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Music, Feeling, Distant, Science

“Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Hell, Night, Heartbreaking, Missing You

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

History, Change

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Pain

“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Feeling

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Variant: Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

People

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Nearly identical quote attributed to a 1995 TV show, Touched by an Angel https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0732136/quotes: Tess: No, hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it's never solved one yet. <br class="br">Misattributed

Hate, Problem

“The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.”

John Irving book A Son of the Circus

Source: A Son of the Circus

“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Wise, Deep, Inspirational

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel) e.d. Michel Sanouille and Elmer Peterson, New York 1973, pp. 139-140
posthumous
Context: The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place... All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

“Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.”

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

Change

“Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.”

Albert Ellis (1913–2007) American psychologist

Happiness

“I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world. They're just sitting there. I can hit them with a two by four.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Personality

“I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Henry Drummond (1851–1897) Scottish evangelist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Supreme Gift

Way

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is often brought on by short people. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

People

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

Men

“Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.”

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American women's rights activist

Thinking, Forgetting

“All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution

Life

“You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that God's creative principle works in you.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Life, God, Way

“The only joy in the world is to begin.”

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

Joy, Happy, Cute

“What in the world would we do without our libraries?”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

“We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time

Way, Nature, Sense, Universe

“There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world’s religions.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Variant: There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
Source: Human, All Too Human

Religion

“God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi:

God, Nature

“The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“Everything that is done in this world is done by hope.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Hope, Hope

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932 (1973), p. 3
Source: Gift from the Sea
Context: I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

Love, Understanding, Suffering, Patience

“I tore off my mask so as not to lose one of her tears… and she did not run away!… and she did not die!… She remained alive, weeping over me, weeping with me. We cried together! I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer.”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

Happiness, Tear

“All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”

Sean O`Casey (1880–1964) Irish writer

“In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.”

Carlos Castaneda book Journey to Ixtlan

Source: Journey to Ixtlan

Death, Decision, Time

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Suffering, Inspirational, Depressing, Life

“The best smell in the world is that man that you love.”

Jennifer Aniston (1969) television and film actress from the United States

Love

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

God, People, Fools, Color

“Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

Change

“I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, I can't do anything to change events anyway.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Change

“I have loved in life and I have been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar,
and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it.
My heart has been rent and joined again;
My heart has been broken and again made whole;
My heart has been wounded and healed again;
A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet.
I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire,
and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love.
I wept in love and made all weep with me;
I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men;
And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes.
The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear;
With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved,
I shook the throne of God in heaven.
I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love,
"Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret."
She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear,
"My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover,
and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

Source: The Dance of the Soul

Love, Life, Death, Men

“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.”

Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) American anthropologist and folklorologist

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

Affliction, Suffering

“Every hundred feet the world changes”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Change

“The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Source: The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book

Laughter, Loneliness

“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Smile, Cry

“Every true artist is at war with the world.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

War

“So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.”

Tamora Pierce Squire

Source: Squire

“Sometimes when I'm alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confide in,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes…
I Cry
and no one cares about why.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Life, Pain, Sadness, Confidence

“Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

As quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1992) by Rosalie Maggio, p. 130

Friendship, Friendship

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Lying, Thinking, Time, Night

“A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

Reality

“Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Life, Perfection

“This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.”

Nina Simone (1933–2003) American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist

Source: I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone

“The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Sense, Painting

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

attributed to Muir by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945), page 331
1910s

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

Love, Life, Youth, Flying

“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Funny

“For you, in my respect, are all the world.
Then how can it be said I am alone
When all the world is here to look on me?”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

“We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

“And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

People, Way, Heart

“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic

Source: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

People, History, Parting

“Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239

Hell

“We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Source: Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge

Dreams, Thinking

“There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

Life, Soul

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Family, Kiss, Time, Heart

“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Appearance

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Sex

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

People, Evil

“Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“How strange! This bed on which I shall lie has been slept on by more than one dying man, but today it does not repel me! Who knows what corpses have lain on it and for how long? But is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse too knows nothing of its father, mother or sisters or Titus. Nor has a corpse a sweetheart. A corpse, too, is pale, like me. A corpse is cold, just as I am cold and indifferent to everything. A corpse has ceased to live, and I too have had enough of life…. Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!… Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man's finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the exact opposite of his best deed. It is therefore right of me to be angry that I was ever born into this world! Why was I not prevented from remaining in a world where I am utterly useless? What good can my existence bring to anyone? … But wait, wait! What's this? Tears? How long it is since they flowed! How is this, seeing that an arid melancholy has held me for so long in its grip? How good it feels - and sorrowful. Sad but kindly tears! What a strange emotion! Sad but blessed. It is not good for one to be sad, and yet how pleasant it is - a strange state…”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

Stuttgart. After 8th September 1831.
Source: "Selected Correspondence Of Fryderyk Chopin"; http://archive.org/stream/selectedcorrespo002644mbp/selectedcorrespo002644mbp_djvu.txt

Life, Children, People, Lie

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

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

Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925)

People, Feeling, Father's Day

“Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Love, Search, Relationship

“What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

Source: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

“It is good to be a cynic—it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world—we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death—the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

"Nietzscheism and Realism" from The Rainbow, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1921); reprinted in "To Quebec and the Stars", and also in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 71
Non-Fiction
Source: Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

Death, Fear, Cats, Suicide