Worlds

The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness. ~~ Susan Sarandon

And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle. ~~ Stan Dunn

Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place. ~~ Ice-T

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it. ~~ Clive James

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in, "That world is gone." ~~ Peggy Noonan

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world. ~~ Lyndon Baines Johnson

Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them. ~~ Curtis Grant

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times. ~~ Angus Wilson

If you tell Congress everything about the world situation, they get hysterical. If you tell them nothing, they go fishing. ~~ Harry S. Truman

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice -- there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. ~~ Frank Zappa

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. ~~ Carl Sagan

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. ~~ Boris Pasternak

There are … two kinds of people in this world, those who long to be understood and those who long to be misunderstood. It is the irony of life that neither is gratified. ~~ Carl Van Vechten

It's hard to tell if the world is actually growing worse, or if the news coverage is just better. ~~ Joe Moore

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ~~ Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. ~~ Virginia Woolf (see Said Who)

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. ~~ W. B. Yeats

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world. ~~ Albert Camus

Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe a dungeon. ~~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker. ~~ Helen Keller

We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good; what would he say now? ~~ George Bernard Shaw

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. ~~ Salman Rushdie

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him. ~~ Jonathan Swift

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I doubt whether the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream. ~~ Heywood Broun

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life. ~~ Muhammad Ali

There are at least two kinds of cowards. One kind always lives with himself, afraid to face the world. The other kind lives with the world, afraid to face himself. ~~ Roscoe Snowden

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies, for the world needs such men more than heaven does. ~~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Sometimes I get the feeling that the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral. ~~ Robert Orben

The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone. ~~ Henrik Ibsen

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice. ~~ Jules Renard

Wise and prudent men -- intelligent conservatives -- have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing times. ~~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. ~~ Margaret Mead

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made. ~~ A. E. Housman

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. ~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it. ~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny. ~~ Tennessee Williams

Civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. ~~ Oscar Wilde

It takes all sorts to make a world. ~~ Miguel de Cervantes

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them, for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. ~~ Sigmund Freud

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless. ~~ Henry Kissinger

Virtue is praised but hated. People run away from it, for it is ice-cold and in this world you must keep your feet warm. ~~ Denis Diderot

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in … Fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood. ~~ Peter Medawar

All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts. ~~ Unattributed

What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? I suppose this depends somewhat upon the size of the soul. I think there are cases where the trade would do. ~~ Josh Billings

Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive -- it's such an interesting world. ~~ Lucy Montgomery

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the real world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind. ~~ Giacomo Leopardi

Politeness costs nothing. Nothing, that is, to him that shows it; but if often costs the world very dear. ~~ W. Allingham

Don't point out your flaws, because the world is not as sympathetic and nurturing as you think. ~~ Jennifer Tilly

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man comes into the world without his consent, goest out against his will, and the trip is exceedingly rocky. ~~ Old Postcard

It's hard to create humor because of the unfair competition from the real world. ~~ Peter's Almanac

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it. ~~ Don Marquis

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring. ~~ H. L. Mencken

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. ~~ Erich Fromm

At 50 you begin to be tired of the world, and at 60 the world is tired of you. ~~ Count Oxenstierna

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it. ~~ Elbert Hubbard

No mockery in the world ever sounds to me as hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness … Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. ~~ Charlotte Bronte

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out. ~~ Walter Winchell

The fools in this world make about as much trouble as the wicked do. ~~ Josh Billings

People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland… An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given. ~~ Sue Grafton

Half of the world's problems are caused by poor communications. The other half are caused by good communications. ~~ Unattributed

He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. ~~ Hermann Hesse

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour. ~~ William Blake

Sometimes the world seemed to come with subtitles, like a foreign film. So help her, sometimes people's hidden motives, their lies, their rationalizations, were so pitifully apparent that Sophia felt she could just sit and read them. ~~ Andrew Klaven [The Uncanny]

One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when suddenly someone needs a cop. ~~ General Colin Powell

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong, without comment. ~~ Theodore H. White

Let him that would move the world, first move himself. ~~ Seneca

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. ~~ Carl Sagan

Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile. ~~ Franklin P. Jones… that our nature and purpose is … to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past. ~~ Dean Koontz [Fear Nothing]

What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork. ~~ Pearl Bailey

Parents need to fill a child's bucket of self-esteem so high that the rest of the world can't poke enough holes in it to drain it dry. ~~ Alvin Price

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

When there is an original sound in the world, it wakens a hundred echoes. ~~ John A. Shedd

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness. ~~ Han Suyin

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. ~~ Lillian Smith

Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humor. ~~ Eric Sevareid

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world. ~~ Benjamin Harrison

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. ~~ John Muir

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder. ~~ Paul Valery

My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. ~~ John F. Kennedy

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world: and that is an idea whose time has come. ~~ Victor Hugo

Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate their subject matters. ~~ B. F. Skinner

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. ~~ Thomas B. Reed

He had so many irons in the fire that he was never able to forge any single one into a weapon with which to conquer his world. ~~ Curthis Dahl

This would be a great world if everyone was as nice to you as the guy who's trying to sell you something. ~~ Unattributed

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning. ~~ Ivy Baker Priest

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision. ~~ Helen Keller

I don't know what kind of weapons will be used in the third world war, assuming there will be a third world war. But I can tell you what the fourth world war will be fought with -- stone clubs. ~~ Albert Einstein

The world has forgotten, in its concern with Left and Right, that there is an Above and Below. ~~ Glen Drake

We need to make a world in which fewer children are born, and in which we take better care of them. ~~ Dr. George Wald

I traveled a good deal all over the world, and I got along pretty good in all these foreign countries, for I have a theory that it's their country and they got a right to run it like they want to. ~~ Will Rogers

In my belief, you cannot deal with the most serious things in the world unless you also understand the most amusing. ~~ Winston Churchill

The world is proof that God is a committee. ~~ Bob Stokes

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. The whole world is doing things. ~~ George Santayana

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. ~~ Lily Tomlin

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help made the world safe for diversity. ~~ John F. Kennedy

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. ~~ Arthur Schopenhauer

My class, you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. ~~ Dead Poets Society (film, 1989)

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream world into reality. ~~ Theodor Reik

You don't have to die; heaven and hell are in this world too. ~~ Japanese proverb

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done -- then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. ~~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

If there's another world, he lives in bliss;

If there is none, he made the best of this. ~~ Robert Burns [Epitaph on William Muir]

The world is content with setting right the surface of things. ~~ John Henry Cardinal Newman

The world is disgracefully managed; one hardly knows to whom to complain. ~~ Ronald Firbank

There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity. ~~ Michel de Montaigne

The Statue of Liberty is not that monument's name. It is Liberty Enlightening the World. ~~ Deane Jordan [1,001 Facts Somebody Screwed Up]

This world we live in is but thickened light. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If all pulled in one direction, the world would keel over. ~~ Yiddish proverb

Maybe this world is another planet's hell. ~~ Aldous Huxley

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a lifestyle that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world. ~~ Margaret Mead

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. ~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye. ~~ Lady Bird Johnson

'Tis always morning somewhere in the world. ~~ Richard Henry Hengist Horne

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding. ~~ Paul Auster

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world. ~~ Ruth Hubbard

Don't overlook the importance of worldwide thinking. A company that keeps its eye on Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to miss Pierre, Hans, and Yoshio. ~~ Al Ries

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: Beware. You will never get out of this world alive. ~~ John Steinbeck

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic. ~~ David Russell

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man. ~~ Pliny the Elder

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoughts are energy. And you can make your world or break your world by thinking. ~~ Susan Taylor

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. ~~ Bertrand Russell

The world's a bubble; and the life of man

Less than a span. ~~ Francis Bacon

A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports that myth. ~~ Edward De Bono

We only want that which is given naturally to all peoples of the world, to be masters of our own fate, not of others, and in cooperation and friendship with others. ~~ Golda Meir

The world began without man, and it will end without him. ~~ Claude Levi-Strauss

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time. ~~ Russell Hoban

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. ~~ Helen Keller

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift. ~~ Tom Stoppard

To become oneself, with all one's strength. Difficult. A bomb, a speech, a rifle shot -- and the world can look a different place. And then where is this self? ~~ Christa Wolf

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world. ~~ George Herbert Walker Bush

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else. ~~ Charles Dickens

Most comics make jokes to defend themselves against what they see as a hostile and inhumane world … often a deeply felt rage. ~~ Samuel S. Janus

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. ~~ T. S. Eliot

The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. ~~ Sean O'Casey

After a person makes his mark in the world, a lot of people will come around with erasers. ~~ Joe Moore

You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

Be wisely worldly, be not worldly wise. ~~ Francis Quarles

Nothing in the world lasts
Save eternal change. ~~ Honorat de Bueil, Marquis de Racan

Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. No path is wholly rough. ~~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world. ~~ Georges Duhamel

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. ~~ Voltaire

In the fight between you and the world, back the world. ~~ Franz Kafka

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. ~~ Robert Louis Stevenson