Quotes on World

The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.

I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.

The political world is defined by relationships rather than transactions, and by numerous actors at home and abroad with independent power. Navigating such a world is difficult and precarious.

The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?

Will you not covet such power as this, and seek such throne as this, and be no more housewives, but queens? There is no putting by that crown; queens you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond. . . . But alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest.

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

Let's stop 'tolerating' or 'accepting' difference, as if we're so much better for not being different in the first place. Instead, let's celebrate difference, because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different.

I believe we can seize this future together, because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. [...] We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions. [...] We are and forever will be the United States of America. [...] We will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.

God blessed me with two unbelievable parents, and I am just like both of them. I have the smile and charisma of my mother and the big heart of my mom, because she wants to save the world and help the world, so I am just like her.

Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.

I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all of its beauty? It felt the encouragement of Light against its being; otherwise we all remain too frightened.

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.

Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything, which enervate a necessary government; excite a jealousy of the rulers who are our own choice, and keep society in confusion for want of a power sufficiently concentered to promote good.

Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world.

The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured - especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.