World Quotes

The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.

The wreckage of stars-I built a world from this wreckage.

What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary.

Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.

In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty-he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world-alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world?

One must be born to any superior world - to make it plainer, one must be bred for it. One has a right to philosophy (taking the word in its greatest sense) only by virtue of one's breeding; one's ancestors, one's blood, decides this, too.

It is even a difficult thing for him [humans] to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does.

Appearance is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things appears in the empirical world.

A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world.

The truth must be told, even if the world should be shivered in fragments.

It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all other drives to accept as a norm.

There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it's government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.

Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.

Still, with all of our faults and problems, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the US ... It's still Day One for this country.