Quotes about the world

page 67

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”

“The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”

“Everything looks different when you're older, not staring up at the world but down upon it.”

“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery,, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]”

“Her beauty belonged to all the world but her flaws belonged to him alone.”

“Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

“The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.”

“You are educated. Your
certification is in your
degree. You may think of
it as the ticket to the good
life. Let me ask you to think of an
alternative. Think of it as your
ticket to change the world.”

“You're mistaken, Father. You were in paradise, but you didn't recognize it. It's the same with most people in this world; they seek suffering in the most joyous of places because they think they are unworthy of happiness.”

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”

“Nothing is really lost or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing…
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers
left from early fires,
… shall duly flame again”

“TELL THE WORLD WHAT YOU INTEND TO DO, BUT FIRST SHOW IT. This is the equivalent of saying "deeds, and not words, are what count most.”

“He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.”

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making
trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.”

“No person [should] walk out into the world to begin the day until he or she has stood beneath the cross to receive God’s love.”

“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”

“Learning something means coming into contact with a world of which you know nothing. In order to learn, you must be humble.”

“Settle for what you can get, but first ask for the World.”

“But paradise is locked and bolted….
We must make a journey around the world to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.”

“Most of the bad guys in the real world don't know that they are bad guys. You don't get a flashing warning sign that you're about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren't looking.”

“I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.”

“A very underestimated part of the world, The Entrance is.”

“I do like the world quite a lot.”

“Wanting him to come back before anyone notices part of the world has not moved since he left.”

“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”

“In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours.
In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.”

“There are a lot of things in this world to be afraid of, but a dead body isn't one of them.”

“Sometimes artist like to catch themselves looking out, let the world see them for once. It's a signature. This one is a very bold one. But this is also a witnessing. We want to remember, and we want to be remembered. That's why we paint.”

“I learned a world from each / one whom I loved”

“And when all the world is overcharged with Inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is Warre, which provideth for every man, by Victory or Death.”

“hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young”

“… do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.”

“All the talking in the world couldn't even prove you and the other person both saw the same color red.”

“In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.”

“You must do something to make the world more beautiful - Ms. Rumphius”

“You're burned into my mind forever. There is nothing, nothing in this world that will ever change that.”

“The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.”

“There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.”

“Something about the way she moves through the world does not lend itself to the care of fragile objects.”

“And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.”

“Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!

(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)”

“There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.”

“I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”

“In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.”

“I think the most important thing in the world is being brave. I'd rathe be brave than beautiful. Hell, I'd settle for acting brave.”

“The world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.”

“[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.”

“An ugly, lovely town… crawling, sprawling… by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world.”

“There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

“And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks”

“If reason ruled the world would history even exist?”

“You're probably the most boring teenager in the world.”

“They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)”

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”

“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”

“And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.”

“The world isn’t that easily turned upside down, Haida replied. It’s people who are turned upside down.”

“It is not a good fancy,' said the llama. 'What profit to kill men?'
Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.”

“I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.”

“Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud.”

“The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”

“If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask… with nothing beneath it?”

“Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.”

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

“As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.”

“We have traveled through space and time. We have been many places. Visited many worlds. And there is good news: the acoustics everywhere are terrific.”

“It is the world, my boy," he said. "All the World, in ink and blood, vellum and parchment, leather and hide. It is the World, and it is yours to save or lose.”

“I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.”

“arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”

“Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.”

“Oh, I'm not afraid of death! What have I got to live for after all? I suppose you believe it's very wrong to kill a person who has injured you-even if they've taken away everything you had in the world?”

“Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.”

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

“Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.”

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.”

“One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about.

(from 'Celestial Navigation')”

“That which you believe becomes your world.”

“Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.”

“I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.”

“Gideon woke up ready to conquer the world, and he liked to start that domination with me.
How lucky was I?”

“One person can't hold anything, but two can have the world…”

“great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.

good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.”

“You can't argue with the fools in the world. It's better to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention.”

“To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.”

“We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky - you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies.”

“A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world.”

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”

“I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.”

“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.”

“At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.”

“You can not make yourself whole again by brooding one hundred percent of the time on the darkness of the world. We are the light of the world.”

“In this world of memories, there's no need for strangers.
-Kenshin to Kaoru”

“The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.”

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”

“From where I sat, Peter and Wendy were the two loneliest figures in the world. But Peter was somehow the lonelier of the two.”

“There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them.”

“The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”