197 World Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We live in the world when we love it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We're trying to make the world a better place for Mankind. (During the WWF 1999 commercial)

All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power. It is not the resplendent robe which arrays the mystic body of God. Nor the obscurely translucent partition between man and mystery. All this world that we see, hear, and touch is that accessible to the human senses, a condensation of the two enormous powers of the Universe permeated with all of God.

Profound and incommensurable is the worth of this flowing world: God clings to it and ascends, God feeds upon it and increases.

Self-alienation is the source of all degradation as well as, on the contrary, the basis of all true elevation. The first step will be a look inward, an isolating contemplation of our self. Whoever remains standing here proceeds only halfway. The second step must be an active look outward, an autonomous, determined observation of the outer world.

God has brought us where we are, to consider the work we may do in the world, as well as at home.

Is this earth? So beautiful and monstrous? Is this what we were?

What is he, then? He is Gauguin, the savage who hates the burden of our civilization, a sort of Titan who, jealous of the creator, makes his own little world in his spare time, a child who takes toys apart in order to build others from the pieces, one who denies and defies, who prefers to see the sky red rather than blue like the rest of us.

The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

'The universe loves a drama,' you know. And ladies and gentlemen this is the show.

And the eyes of the world are watching now.

'The world is the most dangerous place it's ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back.'

I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress - not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.

World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing - specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.

You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? 'I am a Public Preacher;' appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly 'a sign to you,' if your eyes were open!

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world.

Be content -- Expansions, diffusions -- content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame...

The world is a force not a presence.

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, are as sacred in the eye of Almighty God as are your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope.

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.

Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.

A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.

What I mean by the 'pursuit of learning' is not the ability to read classical texts and study ancient history, but to be fully acquainted with conditions all over the world and to have a keen awareness of what is going on abroad and around us. Now from what I can see world trends and conditions are still unsettled, and as long as they remain unsettled there is still a chance that something can be done. First, therefore, we must rectify conditions in our own domain, after which conditions in other domains can be rectified. This having been done, conditions at court can be rectified and finally conditions throughout the whole world can be rectified. First one must set an example oneself and then it can be extended progressively to others. This is what I mean by the 'pursuit of learning.'

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

What a dreary world we live in, gentlemen.

The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself - a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three. ~ Ch. 9

We'll hold hands and then we'll watch the sunrise From the bottom of the sea But first, are you experienced? Uh-have you ever been experienced? Well, I have

Why do so many people dislike science fiction? The answer goes like this: You have to think of science fiction in contrast to its nearest competitor, heroic fantasy. In heroic fantasy, by and large, things are pretty stable, and then some terrible evil comes along that's going to take over the world. People have to fight it. In the end they win, of course, so the earth is restored to what it was. The status quo comes back. Science fiction's quite different. With science fiction, the world's in some sort of a state, and something awful happens. It may not be evil, it may be good or neutral, just an accident. Whatever they do in the novel, at the end the world is changed forever. That's the difference between the two genres - and it's an almighty difference! And the truth is science fiction, because we all live in a world that's changed forever. It's never going to go back to what it was in the '60s or the '70s or the '30s, or whatever. It's changed.

Cause if it did, you couldn't take it, and don't blame me/I was given this world I didn't make it

Heavenly Father I'm a soldier/ I'm gettin hotter cuz the world's gettin colder/ baby let me hold ya

It's not one world.

...there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people...

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

'A Christian Anarchist does not depend on bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused and dying world.'

'We really can't change the world. We really can't change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The best way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!'

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future.

We hear the wail of the remorseful winds In their strange penance. And this wretched orb Knows not the taste of rest; a maniac world, Homeless and sobbing through the deep she goes.

Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux. (I have come too late into a world too old.)

In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.

'Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

He gave the world another world.

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.

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.

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

What would happen to the world if we were human?

I don't believe in the landscape.

With our love, we could save the world.

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

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.

Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the world.

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

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

Man is the microcosm: I am my world.