Selected world quotes

1. And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

2. A brave world, sir, full of religion, knavery, and change: we shall shortly see better days.

3. There ought to be a better way than government to run the world.

4. The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.

5. One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

6. The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

7. The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

8. One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

9. The advance of liberty is the path to both a safer and better world.

10. All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.

11. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

12. A tear that trembles for a little while Upon the trembling eyelid, till the world Wavers within its circle like a dream, Holds more of meaning in its narrow orb Than all the distant landscape that it blurs.

13. It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

14. Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

15. Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

16. I have always wanted to know as much as possible about the world.

17. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

18. The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.

19. The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.

20. The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me.

21. Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

22. The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

23. As long as our souls remain strong, that is all that matters; as long as they don't decline. Because with the fall of certain souls in this world, the world itself will collapse. These are the pillars which support it. They are few, but enough.

24. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

25. We live in the world when we love it.

26. You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed.

27. This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.

28. Thank God for giving you this world as a moral gymnasium to help your development, but never imagine you can help the world.

29. Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

30. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

31. The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

32. The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

33. What a world. It could be so wonderful if it wasn't for certain people.

34. The three eldest children of Necessity: God, the World and love.

35. By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world - By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

36. The world in all doth but two nations bear - The good, the bad; and these mixed everywhere.

37. If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

38. In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world.

39. The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment - an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.

40. On the mountains there is freedom! The world is perfect everywhere, Save where man comes with his torment.

41. The world will not greet you with open arms, but with a clenched fist.

42. He was quite remarkable enough to fill a volume of Eloge. Someone wrote to me yesterday that no Jew for 1800 years has played so great a part in the world. That would be no Jew since St. Paul; and it is very startling.

43. I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule that I can give out, any command. We're all on the frontier, we're all in a great mystery - incredibly mysterious. Each one possesses exactly what each one is working out, and what each one works out relates to their particular set of circumstances of any one day, or any one place around the world.

44. The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.

45. The things that people do cannot under any conditions be more important than the world.

46. He gave the world another world.

47. So many gods, so many creeds; So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs.

48. Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

49. I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.

50. What would happen to the world if we were human?

51. I don't believe in the landscape.

52. With our love, we could save the world.

53. If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

54. And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit, Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

55. Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the world.

56. Open your eyes of love, and see Him who pervades this world! consider it well, and know that this is your own country.

57. In this world gone mad, we will not spank the monkey, the monkey will spank US!

58. Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

59. The world is all that is the case. (1)

60. 94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

61. We live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, as we sometimes seem to.

62. The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

63. The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

64. What I am condemning is that one power, with a president [George W. Bush] who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.

65. Painting isn't an aethetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

66. Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.

67. I'm fascinated by everything. There's just too much going on in too many places that I just daren't miss.

68. What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it!

69. And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

70. The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

71. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

72. As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

73. Je represente un parti qui n'existe pas encore, le parti Revolution-Civilisation. Ce parti fera le vingtieme siecle. Il en sortira d'abord les Etats-Unis d'Europe, puis les Etats-Unis du Monde.

74. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

75. 'Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among the mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the glass there may have been a looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked like it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean. It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: 'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia so much is because it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!'(ch. 15)

76. A world that has produced a Mozart is a world worth saving. What a picture of a better world you have given us, Mozart! ~ Franz Schubert