Quotes about the world
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“There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

Source: Someone Like You (1998)

Faith

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

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

Men, Money, Mountain, Learning

“I leave the world in terrible turmoil. I come back, same turmoil. Nothing at all different. Well, outfits are a little different…”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Source: Astonishing X-Men, Volume 1: Gifted

“The most incomprehensible thing in the world to a man, is a woman who rejects his offer of marriage!”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

Marriage

“Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: The Writing Life

“strange, there's so much religion in the world, but only enough to make us fight over who is right, not enough to make us love one another.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Love, Religion, Fight

“Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Livewire interview (2002)
Context: Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods' presence in his life. He is the 21st century man. However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

Light

“The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.
Context: Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.

Beauty, Peaceful

“There are two kinds of people in the world Ms. Lane: those who survive no matter the cost and those who are walking victims.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

People

“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Travel

“I'm going to stab you through the heart with the same blade… not for the good of the world… but for myself.”

Kaori Yuki Japanese manga artist

Heart

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,' said the Rat. 'And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 1

Sense

“Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Time

“When he stopped walking and kissed me a few minutes later, it was like time had stopped, with the air, my heart, and the world all so still. And it was this I remembered every other time I was with Marshall.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

Kiss, Time, Heart

“The world is full of people who all want the same thing, and you have to do a little something extra to make them remember you.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

People

“Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Source: Adams-Jefferson Letters

Religion, Time, Reading

“Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?” cried the boy. “Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.”

Alex Haley Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Source: Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Way, Boy

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Fear, Sense, Change, Past

“Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Imagination

“Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.”

Stephen King book Pet Sematary

Source: Pet Sematary

Law, Cats, Animals

“But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

Sense

“There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Disputed
Source: This occurs in the film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based upon the novel by Kazantzakis, but has not been located in the novel itself.

“So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

Sun

“Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

People, Hell, Question, Thinking

“In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Beauty

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

Hope

“The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. I'm sixteen now, so you can imagine that's left me with quite a few days of major suckage.”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

Life, Imagination

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Beauty, Hope, Fools, Girl

“there’s too much tension in the world… what hope is there in the middle east if you and i can’t make peace.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Second Helpings

Peace, Hope

“A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves.”

Chögyam Trungpa book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

Source: Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

People

“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”

Ian Fleming book Goldfinger

Source: Goldfinger

Men

“The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Women, Way, Understanding

“Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea?—how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Source: Recipe for Salad, p. 383
Source: A memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith

God, Tea

“The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

Love, Truth, Forgiveness, Appearance

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

Justin Cronin The Passage

Source: The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)

“There are more fools in the world than there are people.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

As quoted in One Big Fib : The Incredible Story of the Fraudulent First International Bank of Grenada (2003) by Owen Platt, p. 37

People, Fools

“The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“The world is filled with people who are no longer needed -- and who try to make slaves of all of us -- and they have their music and we have ours.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

People, Music

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

Books

Time, Reading

“Jason scratched his head. "You named him Festus? You know that in Latin, ‘festus’ means ‘happy’? You want us to ride off to save the world on Happy the Dragon?”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Variant: You named him Fetus? You know in Latin Fetus means happy? You want us to ride off to save the world on Happy the Dragon?
Source: The Lost Hero

Happiness

“There are big bad wolves all over the world who tremble at the sound of his name, yet a little puny coyote girl peanut-buttered the seat of Bran Cornick’s car because he told her that she should wear a dress to perform for the pack.”

Patricia Briggs book Frost Burned

Source: Frost Burned

Cars, Girl

“If she could have anything in the world, he'd asked her, what would it be?

She'd answered that one without hesitation: a best friend. She hastily added, He'd smiled faintly. he'd thought but not said.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Spell of the Highlander

Smile