12 Quotes Tagged: the-world

Sometimes, just before I fall asleep at night, I have a beautiful vision. In my imagination I see the earth floating like an enormous orange, stately and still, in the pure emptiness surrounding her. I see her slowly rotating, always lit up and warmed on one side by her mother, the sun. Ribbons and shreds of cloud float around her, and between these the seas and the multi-coloured continents, with their humid plains and snowy mountaintops, sparkle and shimmer. And I see the hot, yellow deserts and the frozen polar icecaps.
I am so far removed from the beautiful earth that the people scurrying around in their cities are of course no longer visible. Whether this is such a good thing as it seems to be at the time is open to question. But it is a fact that my vision is so beautiful, so restful and so full of peace that I usually fall asleep soon afterwards.
That is why this also seems to be the right moment to end my story, at least for today,

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.

The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible — and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.

If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it.

"It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly."

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

The world's a T.V.
and hang-ups
are commercials.

It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....

In stating these matters, I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

The world would go on; man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.

"Nothing could persuade me that "in the image of God" applied only to man. In fact it seemed to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism -"

What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.