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world quotes

  • If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war, politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea. Adams

    - Dean Gooderham Acheson
    On the Korean War. Quoted in  Joseph Goulden Korea (1992).

  • Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.

    -Joseph Addison
      In The Spectator, no.1,1 Mar.

  • Thesewidows, Sir, arethemost perverse creaturesinthe world.

    -Joseph Addison
      In The Spectator, no.335, 25 Mar.

  • Omnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est, et speculum. Each creature of the world Is as a book, a picture, And a mirror to us.

    -Alan of Lille also known as  'Alanus de Insulis'
    c.1170  De Incarnatione Christi (Rhythmus  Alter), l.1^3.

  • Day by day natural science accumulates new riches† The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected† Everything has been discussed and analyzed, or at least mentioned.

    -Jean le Rond d' Alembert
      Elements of Philosophy.

  • StopThe World, I Want to Get Off.

    -Anonymous
      From the musical by Leslie Bricusse and  Anthony Newley.

  • A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

    -Anonymous
      Sign on desk of  American Express president Louis Gerstner. Quoted in the NewYork Times, 26  Jun.

  • Before you save the world, you've got to save your seat.

    -Anonymous
      On the needfor legislators to keep in close touch with their constituents. Quoted in the NewYork Times, 2  Jan.

  • When the world was made, the rubbish was sent to Stockport.

    -Anonymous
    Quoted in Wolfgang Mieder Investigations of Proverbs, Proverbial Expressions, Quotations and Cliche  s (1984), in turn taken from Notes and Queries (1871).

  • Pange, lingua, gloriosi Corporis mysterium, Sanguinisque pretiosi, Quem in mundi pretium Fructus ventris generosi Rex effudit gentium. Now, my tongue, the mystery telling Of the glorious Body sing, And the Blood, all price excelling, Which the Gentiles' Lord and King, In aVirgin's womb once dwelling, Shed for this world's ransoming.

    - StThomas Aquinas
      Pange Lingua Gloriosi, known as the Corpus Christi hymn (translated by J M Neale et al).

  • Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.

    - Matthew Arnold
      The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems,'The Forsaken Merman', l.43^5.

  • Not milder is the general lot Because our spirits have forgot, In action's dizzying eddy whirled, The something that infects the world.

    - Matthew Arnold
      The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems,'Resignation', l.275^8.

  • The sea of faith 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.

    - Matthew Arnold
      'Dover Beach', stanza 3.

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

    - Matthew Arnold
      Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems,'Stanzas in Memory of the  Author of ''Obermann''', l.93^6.

  • I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Essays in Criticism First Series,'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'.

  • It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.

    - Matthew Arnold
      'On the Study of Celtic Literature'.

  • Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are theguiltyauthors of Fenianism, tofound at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland.

    - Matthew Arnold
      'On the Study of Celtic Literature'.

  • Hebraism and Hellenismbetween thesetwo points of influence moves our world.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Culture and  Anarchy, ch.4.

  • We believe in a League system in which the whole world should be ranged against an aggressor† We do not think that you can deal with national armaments by piling up national armaments in other countries.

    -1st Earl
      House of Commons,11 Mar.

  • I would rather see the old reservoir on Forty-second Auden Street or the original Madison Square Garden than I would any of the lost wonders of the ancient world.

    - Louis Stanton Auchincloss
    Quoted in Carol Gelderman Louis  Auchincloss (1993).

  • All the others translate: the painter sketches Avisible world to love or reject.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      'The Composer' (XXXI V), collected in The English  Auden. Poems1936^39 (1977).

  •   Sob, heavy world, Sob as you spin Mantled in mist, remote from the happy.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
    ^6  The Age of  Anxiety, pt.4,'The Dirge'.

  • To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      'Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier'.

  • Soon you will have forgotten the world, and the world will have forgotten you.

    -Aung San Suu Kyi
    c.  AD 170^180  Meditations, bk.7, no.21 (translated by M Staniforth).

  • One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

    -Jane Austen
      Emma, ch.9.

  • Vim et virtutem et consequentias rerum inventarum notare juvat; quae non in aliis manifestius occurrunt, quam in illis tribus quae antiquis incognitae, et quarum primordia, licet recentia, obscura et ingloria sunt: Artis nimirum Imprimendi, PulverisTormentarii, et Acus Nauticae. Haec enim tria rerum faciem et statum in orbe terrarum mutaverunt. It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequence of discoveries, and these are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder and the magnet [ie the compass]. For thesethreehave changedthewholefaceand stateof things throughout the world.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Novum Organum, bk.1, aphorism129 (translated by  James Spedding).

  • When the world was young it begat more children; but now it is old it begets fewer: for I may justlyaccount new plantations to be the children of former kingdoms.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.33,'Of Plantations'.

  • There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.48,'Of Followers and Friends'.

  • The world's a bubble; and the life of man Less than a span.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
    The World (published1629).

  • Political economy tracesinanabstract way theeffects of the desire to be rich; and nations must nowadays abound in that passion if theyare to have much poweror respect in the world.

    -Walter Bagehot
      'Preliminaries of Political Economy', collected in Economic Studies (1880).

  •    America, thou half-brother of the world; With something good and bad of every land.

    - PhilipJames Bailey
      Festus, sc.10.

  • There is a wind of nationalism and freedom blowing round the world, and blowing as strongly in Asia as elsewhere.

    - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin (of Bewdley)
      Speech, Dec.

  • But when a man who sees the world one way becomes Barker theslave of a manwho interpretstheworld inexactly the opposite way, the result is, to my mind, the worst possible kind of slavery.

    -Jones
      Blues People, ch.1.

  • Give methemanwho will surrender the whole world for a moss or a caterpillar, and impracticable visions for a simple human delight.

    -Bruce Frederick Cummings
      Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains,'Crying for the Moon'.

  • The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.

    - Donald Barthelme
      Guilty Pleasures,'Down the Line with the  Annual'.

  • Certes, je sortirai quant a'   moi satisfait D'un monde o  u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re"  ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream.

    - Charles Baudelaire
      Les Fleurs du mal,'Le Reniement de Saint-Pierre'.

  • Comme l'imagination a cre  e   le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.

    - Charles Baudelaire
      Le Spleen de Paris,'Salon de1859', pt.4.

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

    - Brendan Francis Behan
      The Roundheads, act1, sc.1.

  •    Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz. that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mindthat their being is to be perceived or known.

    - George Berkeley
      A  Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge, pt.1, section 6.

  • Headstones stagger under great draughts of time after heads pass out, and their world must reel speechless, blind in the end about its chilling star

    -John originally John Allyn Smith Berryman
      'Homage to Mistress Bradstreet', stanza 55.

  • The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arousethesleeper, toshakethe complacent pillars ofthe world.He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, and shows the world its present, and points the way to its new birth.He isat oncetheproduct and thepreceptorof his time.

    - Norman Bethune
      Letter from Madrid, 5 May. Quoted in Ted  Allen and Sydney Gordon The Scalpel, The Sword (1952).

  • Then were the entrances of this world made narrow, full of sorrow and travail: they are but fewand evil, full of perils, and very painful. For the entrances of the elder world were wide and sure, and brought immortal fruit. If then they that live labour not to enter these strait and vain things, they can never receive those that are laid up for them.

    -Bible (Apocrypha)
    Esdras 7:12^14.

  • For the world hath lost his youth, and the times begin to wax old.

    -Bible (Apocrypha)
    Esdras14:10.

  • Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it.

    -Bible (Apocrypha)
    Wisdom of Solomon 2:24.

  • Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him,Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written,Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Matthew 4:8^10.

  • Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Matthew 5:14^16.

  • For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Matthew16:25^6.

  •    And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Matthew 28:20.

  • And he said unto them,Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Mark16:15.

  • And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Luke 2:1.

  • That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John1:9^10.

  • The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith,Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John1:29.

  • For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John 3:16.

  • Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John 8:12.

  •   Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you, Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John14:27.

  • These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be 118 of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John16:33.

  • Thesethat haveturned the world upside down are come hither also.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Acts of the  Apostles17:6.

  • Forafter that inthewisdomof God theworld by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. Romans

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Corinthians1:21.

  • We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Corinthians 4:9.

  • Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us,Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Ephesians 3:20^1.

  • For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
      Timothy 6:7^8.

  • Of whom the world was not worthy.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Hebrews11:38.

  • Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there; Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind. The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

    - (Robert) Laurence Binyon
      'The Burning of the Leaves'.

  • The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and stout swords.

    - F(rederick) E(dwin) Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
      Rectorial address, Glasgow University,7 Nov.

  • My mother groaned! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt, Helpless, naked, piping loud Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

    -William Blake
      Songs of Experience,'Infant Sorrow'.

  • To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.

    -William Blake
    c.1803  Auguries of Innocence, l.1^4.

  • Man was made for Joyand Woe, And when this we rightly know, Thro'the world we safely go. Joy and Woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine.

    -William Blake
    c.1803  Auguries of Innocence, l.56^60.

  •    A miracle is not the breaking of the laws of the fallen world.It is the re-establishment of the laws of the kingdom.

    -Sourozh
      Living Prayer.

  • I am for the woods against the world, But are the woods for me?

    - Edmund Charles Blunden
      'The Kiss'.

  • What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!

    - Henry StJohn, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
      Letter to  Jonathan Swift, 3  Aug.

  • It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world† But for Wales!

    - Robert Oxton Bolt
      Thomas More.  A Man for All Seasons.

  • Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Morning Prayer, Gloria.

  • O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed: Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Evening Prayer, Second Collect.

  •    A full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Holy Communion, Prayer of Consecration.

  • We receive this Child into the Congregation of Christ's flock, and dosign him with thesign of the Cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end. Amen.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Publick Baptism of Infants, Reception of the Child.

  • I should renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Catechism.

  • Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou art God from everlasting, and world without end.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Psalm 90:1^2.

  • A democracy must remain at home in all matters that affect the nature of her institutions. Theyare of a nature to call for the undivided attention and devotion of the entire nation.We do not want the racial antipathies or national antagonisms of the Old World transformed to this continentas they will, should we becomea part of European politics. The people of this country are overwhelmingly for a policy of neutrality.

    -William Edgar Borah
      Radio broadcast, 22 Feb.

  •   I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland,Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home.

    -James Boswell
      Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (ed F  A Pottle,1936), entry for14  Aug.

  • The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies, With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies, When love is done. See Lyly 523:12.

    - F(rancis) W(illiam) Bourdillon
      Among the Flowers,'Light'.

  • My first act on entering this world was to kill my mother.

    -William Andrew Murray Boyd
      The New Confessions, opening words.

  • The natural world is full of irregularityand random alteration, but in the antiseptic, dust-free, shadowless, brightly lit, abstract realm of the mathematicians they like their cabbages spherical, please.

    -William Andrew Murray Boyd
      Brazzaville Beach,'Cabbages  Are Not Spheres'.

  • It seems to methat there are statements about the world andourlivesthat havenoneedofformalproof procedures.

    -William Andrew Murray Boyd
      Brazzaville Beach,'Fermat's Last Theorem II'.

  • My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discoveryabouttheworld.Onefinds one can do without it completely.

    - Malcolm Stanley Bradbury
      Stepping Westward, bk.1, ch.2.

  • May cricket continue to flourish and spread its wings. The world can only be richer for it.

    - Sir Don(ald George) Bradman
      The Art of Cricket.

  •    If youget hungup oneverybodyelse'shangups,thenthe whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.

    - Richard Brautigan
      The Abortion:  An Historical Romance.

  • No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

    - EmilyJane Bronte« 
      'No Coward Soul is Mine', in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

  • Men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past. 158

    - SirThomas Browne
    ^5  Religio Medici (published1643), pt.1, section 6.

  • The world was beforethecreationand at anend beforeit had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive. Though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.

    - SirThomas Browne
    ^5  Religio Medici (published1643), pt.1, section 59.

  •    Let the world's sharpness like a clasping knife Shut in upon itself, and do no harm In this close hand of love.

    - Elizabeth ne  e Barrett Browning
      Poems,'Sonnets from the Portuguese', sonnet 24.

  • I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the World without this trivial and vulgar way of coition: it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

    - SirThomas Browne
    ^5  Religio Medici (published1643), pt.2, section 9.

  • Whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm of little world,I find myself something more than the great. There is surelya piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.

    - SirThomas Browne
    ^5  Religio Medici (published1643), pt.2, section11.

  • Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.

    - SirThomas Browne
      Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), ch.4.

  • The year's at the spring, And days at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heaven All's right with the world.

    - Robert Browning
    Pippa Passes, pt.1.

  • Like a god going thro' his world there stands One mountain, for a moment in the dusk, Whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow

    - Robert Browning
    Pippa Passes, pt.2.

  • This world's no blot for us Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

    - Robert Browning
      Men and Women,'Fra Lippo Lippi'.

  • God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her!

    - Robert Browning
      Men and Women,'One Word More. To E.B.B.', stanza18.

  • The world is made up for the most part of fools and knaves.

    - GeorgeVilliers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham
    'To Mr Clifford, on his Humane Reason', collected in The Dramatic Works (1715), vol.2.

  • You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else isgrandiose romanticism or politics.

    - Charles Bukowski
      Tales of Ordinary Madness,'Too Sensitive'.

  • For a'that, and a'that, It's comin' yet for a'that, That Man to Man the warld o'er Shall brothers be, for a'that.

    - Robert Burns
      'For a' that and a' that', stanza 5.

  • I have not loved the world, nor the world me.

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 3, stanza113.

  • While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome fallsthe World.

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza145.

  • There'snot a joy theworld cangive likethat ittakes away.

    -Rochdale
      'Stanzas for Music'.

  • How beautiful is all this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself! But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we, Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation and of pride.

    -Rochdale
      Manfred, act1, sc.2.

  • Look Matop of the world.

    -James Cagney
      Line delivered in White Heat (screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts). BC US crime writer.

  • A lie can travel halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on. See Spurgeon 811:41.

    -Baron
      Speech in the House of Commons, Nov.

  • I'm king of the world.

    -James Cameron
      Accepting his Best Director Oscar for Titanic (1997), 23 Mar, an allusion to a line in Titanic.

  • Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell, And Freedom shriekedas Kosciusko fell!

    -Thomas Campbell
      The Pleasures of Hope, pt.1, l.381^2.

  • L'homme se trouve devant l'irrationnel. Il sent en lui son de s ir de bonheur et de raison. L'absurde na|"t de cette confrontation entre l'appel humain et le silence de  raisonnable du monde. Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

    - Albert Camus
      Le Mythe de Sisyphe ( The Myth of Sisyphus,1955),'The Absurd Walls'.

  • I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old.

    - George Canning
      Speech to the Commons, on Portugal,12 Dec.

  • The wiser world doth greater thee confess Than all men else, than thy self only less.

    -Thomas Carew
      'To Ben  Jonson, Upon occasion of his Ode of Defiance annexed to his play of  The New Inn'.

  • To reform a world, to reform a nation no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

    -Thomas Carlyle
      Signs of the Times.

  •    Be no longer a chaos, but a world, or even worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name!'Tistheutmostthou hast inthee: out with it, then.

    -Thomas Carlyle
    ^4  Sartor Resartus, bk.2, ch.9.

  • He who first shortened the labour of copyists by device of MovableTypes was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole newdemocratic world: hehad inventedtheart of printing.

    -Thomas Carlyle
    ^4  Sartor Resartus, bk.1, ch.5.

  • 'If everybody minded their own business,'the Duchess said, in a hoarse growl,'the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'

    -Dodgson
      Alice's  Adventures in Wonderland, ch.6,'Pig and Pepper'.

  • What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'The Knight's Tale', l.2777^8.

  • This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'The Knight's Tale', l. 2847^8.

  • In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.

    - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
      Letter to  Arthur Charles Stanhope,12 Oct.

  • They died to save their country and they only saved the world.

    - G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
      'English Graves'.

  • Keep up appearances; there lies the test; The world will give thee credit for the rest. Outward be fair, however foul within; Sin if thou wilt, but then in secret sin.

    - Charles Churchill
      Night, l.311^12.

  • That long frontier fromthe Atlantic tothe Pacificoceans, guarded only by neighbourly respect and honourable obligations, is an exampleto everycountryand a pattern for the future of the world.

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Address at the Canada Club, London, 20  Apr.

  • Would a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth be inconsistent with our overriding loyalty to the world organization?

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Speech at Fulton, Missouri, Mar.

  • One had as good be out of the World, as out of the Fashion.

    - Colley Cibber
      Love's Last Shift: or, The Fool in Fashion, act 2, sc.1.

  • Le temps et le monde et la personne ne se rencontrent qu'une seule fois. Time, the world and the person only encounter one another once.

    - He  le'  ne Cixous
      Dedans.

  • This world is bad enough maybe; We do not comprehend it; But in one fact can all agree God won't, and we can't mend it.

    - Arthur Hugh Clough
      Dipsychus (published1865), sc.5.

  • Il de  couvrait†le monde des e  motions qu'on nomme, a' la le  ge'  re, physiques. He was discovering†the world of the emotions that are so lightly called physical.

    -Colette full name Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
      Le Ble   en herbe.

  • Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.

    - Cuthbert, Baron Collingwood
      Remark to troops before the Battle of  Trafalgar, 21 Oct. Quoted in G L Newnham Collingwood (ed)  A Selection from the Correspondence of Lord Collingwood (1828), vol.1.

  • I came upstairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar.

    -William Congreve
      Jeremy. Love for Love, act 2, sc.7.

  • The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously.

    - Cyril Vernon Connolly
      The Unquiet Grave, pt.2.

  •    To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world isgood. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of it being made so.

    - Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
      'Books'.

  • It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world.Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

    -Constantinus
      Victory, author's note.

  • In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, pervert and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe. For him, truth is so seldom the sudden lightthat showsneworderand beauty; more often, truth is the uncharted rock that sinks his ship in the dark.

    - SirJohnWarcup Cornforth
      Nobel prize speech.

  • You promise heavens free from strife, Pure truth, and perfect change of will; But sweet, sweet is this human life, So sweet, I fain would breathe it still; Your chilly stars I can forgo, This warm kind world is all I know.

    -William originally  WilliamJohnson Cory
      Ionica, Poems,'Mimnermus in Church'.

  • Of all the pleasures in the world, travel is (in my opinion) the sweetest and most delightful.

    -Thomas Coryate
    Coryat's Crudities Hastily Gobled Up in Five Moneths' Travells.

  • I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

    - Douglas Coupland
      Claire speaking of her parents. Generation X,'EatYour Parents'.

  • The world's a scene of changes, and to be Constant, in Nature were inconstancy.

    - Abraham Cowley
      The Mistress,'Inconstancy'.

  • But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at. Nations would do well To extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.

    -William Cowper
      The Task, bk.5,'The Winter Morning Walk', l.187^92.

  • En perseguirme, Mundo, Que   interesas? En que   te ofendo, cuando so  lo intento poner bellezas en mi entendimiento y no mi entendimiento en las bellezas? World, in hounding me, what do you gain? How can it harm you if I choose, astutely, rather to stock my mind with things of beauty, than waste its stock on every beauty's claim?

    - SorJuana Ine  s de la Cruz
      Poes|  a, teatro y prosa,'Que  jase de la suerte' (translated as 'She Complains about Her Fate',1985).

  • To create is first of all to destroy†there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and

    - e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings cummings

  • What about the world, Mr Cummings? I live in so many: which one do you mean?

    - e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings cummings
      Introduction to revised edition of  The Enormous Room.

  • Fluent in all the languages dead or living, the sun comes up with a word of worlds all spinning in a world of words.

    - (Thomas) Allen Munro Curnow
      An Incorrigible Music,'A Balanced Bait in Handy Pellet Form'.

  • I that have loved thee thus before thou fadest, My faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning. The world shall find this miracle in me, That fire can burn when all the matter's spent.

    - Samuel Daniel
      Delia, sonnet 33.

  • In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

    - Sir Francis Darwin
      'Francis Galton', in Eugenics Review, vol.6, issue1,  Apr.

  • The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed. A man must stay sober: not always, but most of the time.

    - Clarence Shepard Day
    The Crow's Nest,'In His Baby Blue Ship'.

  • Now we lament one Who danced on a plume of words, Sang with a fountain's panache, Dazzled like slate roofs in sun After rain, was flighty as birds And alone as a mountain ash. The ribald, inspired urchin Leaning over the lip Of his world, as over a rock pool Or a lucky dip, Found everything brilliant and virgin.

    - Cecil Day-Lewis
      'In Memory of Dylan Thomas'.

  • We know, Mr.Wellerwe, who are men of the world that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^7  The Gentleman in Blue. Pickwick Papers, ch.37.

  • The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respirationa troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if during this brief period,Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^9  Oliver Twist, ch.1.

  • What aworld of gammonand spinnage it is, though, ain't it?

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^50  Miss Mowcher. David Copperfield, ch.22.

  • The evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushingofthelarger worlds, and cannot seethemasthey circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^3  Of the world of fashion. Bleak House, ch.2.

  • I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as if you ought to be grateful to me, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity† For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^3  Harold Skimpole. Bleak House, ch.6.

  • In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^1 Great Expectations, ch.8.

  • Fancy being remembered around the world for the invention of a mouse!

    -Walt(er Elias) Disney
    c.1966  Comment to his wife during his last illness. Quoted in Leonard Mosley Disney's World (1985).

  • The Continent will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
      House of Commons,15 Mar.

  • What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
      Coningsby, bk.4, ch.1.

  • When a manfell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
      Lothair, ch.28.

  • Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tired with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime Tells me from you that now 'tis your bed time.

    -John Donne
    c.1595  Elegies, no.19,'To His Mistress Going to Bed'.

  • Sweetest love I do not go, For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter Love for me; But since that I Must die at last,'tis best, To use myself in jest Thus by feigned deaths to die.

    -John Donne
    c.1595^1605  'Song: Sweetest love I do not go', collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

  • I am a little world made cunningly Of elements and an angelic sprite.

    -John Donne
    c.1610^1615  Holy Sonnets, no.15.

  • What if this present were the world's last night?

    -John Donne
    c.1610^1615  Holy Sonnets, no.19.

  • She, she is dead; she's dead; when thou know'st this, Thou know'st how dry a cinder this world is.

    -John Donne
      'An  Anatomy of the World: The First  Anniversary'.

  • It istoo littleto call mana little world; except God, manis a diminutive to nothing.

    -John Donne
      Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation no.4.

  • All the four Monarchies, with all their thousands of years, and all the powerful Kings and all the beautiful Queens ofthis world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, all in one morning, in respect to this day.

    -John Donne
      On eternity. Sermon, 30  Apr.

  • The world is a great volume, and man the index of that book.

    -John Donne
      'Sermon preached at the Funeral of Sir William Cockayne', 12 Dec.

  •    If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.

    -James Harold Doolittle
    ^80  The Brothers Karamazov, bk.2, ch.6.

  • If Stalin had learned to play cricket, the world might now be a better place.

    - Dr Richard Downey
      Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  • Matilda Briggs†was a ship which is associated with the giant ratof Sumatra, a story for whichtheworld isnot yet prepared.

    - SirArthur Conan Doyle
      The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,'The Sussex Vampire'.

  • I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty.

    -John Dryden
      The Maiden Queen, act 3, sc.1.

  • Then he defies the world and bids it pass.

    -John Dryden
      Of  Antony.  All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act1.

  • Give, you gods, Give to your boy, your Caesar, The rattle of a globe to play withal, Thisgewgaw world, and put him cheaply off: I'll not be pleased with less than Cleopatra.

    -John Dryden
      Anthony.  All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act 2, sc.1.

  • My heart's so full of joy, That I shall do some wild extravagance Of love in public; and the foolish world, Which knows not tenderness, will think me mad.

    -John Dryden
      All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act 2.

  • Nature meant me A wife, a silly, harmless, household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit; But Fortune, that has made a mistress of me, Has thrust me out to the wide world, unfurnish'd Of falsehood to be happy.

    -John Dryden
      Cleopatra.  All for Love,or The World Well Lost, act 4.

  • War, he sung, is toil and trouble; Honour but an empty bubble. Never ending, still beginning, Fighting still, and still destroying, If the world be worth thy winning, Think, oh think, it worth enjoying.

    -John Dryden
      Alexander's Feast, l.97^102.

  • And Antony, who lost the world for love.

    -John Dryden
      Palamon and  Arcite, bk.2, l.607.

  • Since every man who lives is born to die, And none can boast sincere felicity, With equal mind, what happens, let us bear, Nor joy nor grieve too much for things beyond our care. Like pilgrims to th'appointed place we tend; The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.

    -John Dryden
      Palamon and  Arcite, bk.3, l.883^8.

  • The Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself. Their objective was the world. They would not tolerate compromise on goals, only on tactics.

    -John Foster Dulles
    Comment to his brother Allen. Quoted in Peter Grose Gentleman Spy (1994).

  • One of the saddest features of the real world is that goods do not spontaneously present themselves for distribution.

    -The Economist
      The Economist, 5 Nov.

  • Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if therandomelement decreasesthearrow pointstowards the past† I shall usethe phrase'time's arrow'to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.

    - SirArthur Stanley Eddington
      The Nature of the Physical World, ch.4. Martin  Amis used the phrase'Time's  Arrow' for the title of his1991novel.

  •    I have very little experience of self-government. In fact, I am one of the most governed people in the world.

    - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
      In the NewYork Times, 30 Dec.

  •    We are suffering a national defeat comparable to any lost military campaign, and what is more, it is self- inflicted† It is about time that we pulled our fingers out† The rest of the world most certainly does not owe us a living.

    - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
      Speech to British industrialists, London,17 Oct.

  • Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us O'er the world's tempestuous sea.

    -John Edmeston
    Sacred Lyrics, Set 2,'Lead us, Heavenly Father'.

  • To be loose with grammar is to be loose with the worst woman in the world.

    - Otis C(arl),Jr Edwards
      New Testament lecture, Nashotah House,10  Jan.

  • The most incomprehensiblething abouttheworld isthat it is comprehensible.

    - Albert Einstein
      In Life Magazine.

  • The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywheremarchwith you.

    - Dwight D(avid) Eisenhower
      Despatch to US forces on D-Day, 6  Jun.

  • If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.

    - Dwight D(avid) Eisenhower
       Address to the nation on Israel's invasion of Egypt, 20 Feb.

  • My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

    - Sir Edward Elgar
    Quoted in R  J Buckley Sir Edward Elgar (1905), ch.4.

  • The bad poet dwells partly in a world of objects and partly in a world of words, and he never can get them to fit.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      The Sacred Wood,'Swinburne as a Poet'.

  • This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      'The Hollow Men', closing lines.

  • At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.2.

  • After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.5.

  • Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.5.

  •    By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard around the world.

    - RalphWaldo Emerson
      'Concord Hymn', opening lines. This poem was sung on 4  Jul1837 at the dedication of the monument commemorating the battle of19  Apr1775.

  • Though wetravel theworld over tofind the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

    - RalphWaldo Emerson
    Essays: First Series,'Art'.

  • Isnot marriageanopenquestion, whenit isalleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institutionwishtoget out; and suchas are out wishtoget in.

    - RalphWaldo Emerson
      Representative Men,'Montaigne; or, The Skeptic'.

  • The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

    - RalphWaldo Emerson
    US      philosopher      and      poet,      a      central      figure      of 1850  Representative Men,'Uses of Great Men'.

  • I have but one request to make at my departure from this world, it isthe charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives, dare now vindicate them, let no prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace! Let my memory be left in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justicetomycharacter.Whenmycountry takesher place among thenations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

    - Robert Emmet
      Speech before being sentenced.

  • [The] English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimatelyat the possession of a bourgeoisaristocracyand a bourgeoisproletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.

    - Friedrich Engels
      Letter to Karl Marx,7 Oct.

  • Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

    -JuliusJ Epstein
      Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca (with Philip G Epstein and Howard Koch).

  • I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to seethat the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

    -JuliusJ Epstein
      Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca (with Philip G Epstein and Howard Koch).

  • There, I believed, lay the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved inour world of today.Ihad cometotheturn of the road; and for better or worse I chose the forest path. 319

    - Percy Harrison Fawcett
      Of South  America. Collected in Brian Fawcett (ed) Exploration Fawcett (1953).

  •    Fiat justitia et pereat mundus. Let justice be done, though the world may perish. SeeWatson 891:1.

    -Ferdinand I
    Motto.

  • Todo se ha escrito, todo se ha dicho, todo se ha hecho, oyo   Dios que le dec|an y a u n no hab|a creado el mundo, todav|a no hab|a nada.Tambie  n eso ya me lo han dicho, repuso quiza   desde la vieja, hendida Nada.Ycomenzo  . Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been made: that's what God heard before creating the world, when there was nothing yet. I have also heard that one, he may have answered from the old, split Nothingness. And then he began.

    - Macedonio Ferna n dez
      Museo de la novela de la Eterna ('The Museum of Eternity's Novel'),'Pro  logo a la eternidad'.

  • Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world.

    - Henry Fielding
      Rape upon Rape, act 2, sc.5.

  • The world isdisgracefully managed, onehardly knowsto whom to complain.

    - (ArthurAnnesley) Ronald Firbank
      Vainglory, ch.10.

  •    And as the moon rose higher the unessential houses begantomelt awayuntilgradually Ibecameaware ofthe old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyesa fresh, green breast of the new world† For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

    - F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald
      The Great Gatsby, ch.9.

  • Un romancier, selon moi, n'a pas le droit de dire son avis sur les choses de ce monde. Il doit, dans sa vocation, imiter Dieu dans la sienne, c'est-a'  -dire faire et se taire. A novelist, in my opinion, does not have the right to give advice on the affairs of the world. He must, in his occupation, imitate God in His; that is to say, create and keep quiet.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      Letter to Mlle Bosquet.

  • Are you at ease now? Is your heart at rest? Now you have got a shadow, an umbrella To keep the scorching world's opinion From your fair credit. 328

    - Dario Fo
      Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, act 3, sc.1. Italian      playwright       and       actor-manager,       whose often

  • Religion is far more acute than science, and if it only added judgement to insight, would be the greatest thing in the world.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
    ^14  Maurice (published1971), ch.44.

  • Theygoforth intoaworld†of menwhoareas various as the sands of the sea; into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into it with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
      On public schoolboys.  Abinger Harvest,'Notes on English Character'.

  • The historian must have a third quality as well: some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
      Abinger Harvest,'Captain Edward Gibbon'.

  • How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the worldand how much the best.

    - CharlesJames Fox
      Onthefallof theBastille. Letter toRichardFitzpatrick,30  Jul.

  • Walkcheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.

    - George Fox
      Journal of George Fox.

  • La faim et l'amour sont les deux axes du monde. Hunger and love are the two axes of the world.

    -Thibault
      La Vie litte  raire, pt.3.

  • In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. See Defoe 258:25.

    - Anne Frank
      Letter to  Jean Baptiste Le Roy,13 Nov.

  • Technik†Kniff, dieWelt so einzurichten, dass wir sie nicht erleben mu«  ssen. Technology†the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

    - Max Rudolph Frisch
      Homo Faber, pt.2.

  • Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favour fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

    - Robert Lee Frost
      'Fire and Ice', complete poem.

  • And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

    - Robert Lee Frost
      'The Lesson for Today'.

  • Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude?

    - C(harles) B(urgess) Fry
      The Lady's Not for Burning, act 3.

  •    Much of the world's work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

    -John Kenneth Galbraith
      The Age of Uncertainty, ch.3.

  • On the Beach is a storyabout the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.

    - Ava originally Lucy Johnson Gardner
      Alleged comment to Australian journalist Neil Jillett of the Melbourne Age at the shooting of a film based on the book by British^ Australian novelist Nevil Shute.

  •    Prisons, cachots, lieux be  nis o  u' le mal est impossible, puisqu'ils sont le carrefour de toute la male  diction du monde. On ne peut pas commettre le mal dans le mal. Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible becausetheyarethe crossroads of all the evil in the world.One cannot commit evil in hell.

    -Jean Genet
      Le Balcon,'Deuxi e' me tableau'.

  • If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during whichthe conditionof thehumanrace was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

    - Edward Gibbon
    ^88  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.3.

  • The Huns†chanted a funeral song to the memory of a hero, glorious inhis life, invincible in his death, the father of his people, the scourge of his enemies, and the terror of the world.

    - Edward Gibbon
    ^88  Description of the funeralof  Attila the Hun. TheDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.35.

  • I often think it's comical How Nature always does contrive That every boyand every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!

    - Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
      Private Willis's song, Iolanthe, act 2.

  • The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well: Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George's glorious days!

    - Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
      Lord Mountarat's song, Iolanthe, act 2.

  • Poetryisnotanexpressionofthepartyline.It'sthattimeof night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

    - Allen Ginsberg
    Quoted in Barry Miles Ginsberg (1989), ch.5.

  • All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

    -W(illiam) E(wart) Gladstone
      Speech, Liverpool, 28  Jun.

  • Philip is a living example of natural selection. He was as fitted to survive in this modern world as a tapeworm in an intestine.

    - Sir William (Gerald) Golding
      Free Fall, ch.2.

  • Boy, I got vision. The rest of the world wears bifocals.

    -William Goldman
       Anachronistic line delivered by Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  •    If the Russian word 'perestroika' has easily entered the international lexicon, it isduetomorethanjust interest in what isgoing on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring; that is, progressive development, a fundamental change.

    - Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
      Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.

  • The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscapes on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

    -Thomas Gray
    Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.1^8.

  • Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever† Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would no longer be the daily possibility of love dying.

    - (Henry) Graham Greene
      The Quiet  American, pt.1, ch.3.

  • We musn't complaintoomuch of being comediansit's anhonourableprofession.Ifonly we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style.

    - (Henry) Graham Greene
      The Comedians, pt.2, ch.5.

  • The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.

    - (Henry) Graham Greene
      Quoted in'Sayings of theYear', the Observer, Dec.

  • I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show toany fellow-creature, let me doit now†for Ishall not pass this way again.

    - Stephen Grellet
    Attributed.

  • I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

    - Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
      Speech,York, 4 Nov.

  •    To be able to be caught up into the world of thoughtthat is educated.

    - Edith Hamilton
    Quoted in the Saturday Evening Post, 27 Sep1958.

  • It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world.

    -Thomas Hardy
      The Woodlanders, ch.1.

  • Well,World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were.

    -Thomas Hardy
      Winter Words,'He Never Expected Much'.

  • The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
    The House of the Seven Gables, ch.12.

  • The world owes all its onward impulse to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
    The House of the Seven Gables, ch.20.

  • How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
      The Marble Faun, ch.12.

  • But all the world understands my language.

    - FranzJoseph Haydn
      Reply to Mozart, who had advised him against visiting England because he could not speak the language. Quoted in Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser A Dictionary of Musical Quotations (1985).

  • The present is anage of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world isgrowing old.We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.

    -William Hazlitt
      Spirit of the Age,'Mr Coleridge'.

  • The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

    -William Hazlitt
      The Plain Speaker,'On the Pleasure of Hating'.

  •    Love, you shall perfect for me this child Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking: Within new limits now, arrange the world And square the circle: four walls and a ring.

    - SeamusJustin Heaney
      Death of a Naturalist,'Poem: For Marie'.

  • Dies Osterreich ist eine kleineWelt, In der die groÞe ihre Probe h a« lt. Austria is a little world in which the big one holds its tryouts.

    -William Least originally  WilliamTrogdon Heat-Moon
    On the social and political disintegration affecting the  Austro- Hungarian Empire in the late1890s. Quoted in Heinrich Benedikt (ed) Geschichte der Republik Oesterreich (1954).

  • The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

    - Ernest Millar Hemingway
      Frederic Henry.  A Farewell to  Arms, ch.34.

  • For to be yong I wald not, for my wis, Off all this warld to mak me lord and king: The more of age, the nerar hevynnis blis.

    - Robert Henryson
    c.1460  'The Praise of  Age', l.5^9.

  • The world is an ever-living fire.

    -Heraclitus   fl.500
    c.500  BC  Quoted in Kirk, Raven and Schofield (eds)  The Presocratic Philosophers (1957), ch.6.

  • The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.

    -Heraclitus   fl.500
    Collected in Charles H Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (1979).

  • Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing My God and King.

    - George Herbert
    'Antiphon', collected in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (published posthumously,1633).

  •    O mighty love! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him.

    - George Herbert
    'Man', collected in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (published posthumously,1633).

  • When God at first made man, Having a glass of blessings standing by, 'Let us,'said he,'pour on him all we can: Let the world's riches, which disperse'  d lie, Contract into a span'.

    - George Herbert
    'The Pulley', collected in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (published posthumously,1633).

  • There are those who prefer to get away inwardly, some with the help of a powerful imagination and an ability to abstract themselves from their surroundings†some with the help of opium or alcohol† I prefer shifting my whole body to shifting my brain, and going round the world to letting my head go round.

    - Alexander Ivanovich Herzen
    ^7  Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts, translated by Constance Garnett,1924).

  • I had a tremendous world in my head and more than three-quarters of it will be buried with me.

    - Dorothy Coade later Davies and Lilley Hewett
    Sally Banner. The Chapel Perilous, act 2.

  • To Walden the saxophone was, at once, his key to the world in which he found himself, and the way by which that world was rendered impotent to brand him either a failure or madman or Negro or saint.

    -John Clellon Holmes
      The Horn,'Chorus:  Walden'.

  • Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery, Swift to be hurled Anywhere, anywhere, Out of the world!

    -Honorius of Autun
      'The Bridge of Sighs'.

  • See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world?

    - Richard Hooker
      Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

  • The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil† Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wearsman'ssmudgeand sharesman'ssmell: thesoil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

    -Gerard Manley Hopkins
      'God's Grandeur'.

  • Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

    -Gerard Manley Hopkins
      'God's Grandeur'.

  • What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

    -Gerard Manley Hopkins
      'Inversnaid'.

  • Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I've lain, Happy till I woke again.

    - A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
      A Shropshire Lad, no.62.

  • We for a certaintyare not the first Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

    - A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
      Last Poems, no.9.

  • 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(lfred) E(dward) Housman
      Last Poems, no.12.

  • For all the Saints who from their labours rest, WhoThee by faith before the world confess'd, Thy name,OJesu, be for ever blest, Alleluia!

    -WilliamWalsham How
      'For  All the Saints', in Earl Nelson Hymns for Saints' Days.

  • Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcis est. Fortis autem jam cui omne solum patria est, perfectus vero cui mundus totus exsilium est. He whose own homeland is sweet to him is a mere beginner. He to whom every soil is as his native land is strong. But he to whom the whole world is a place of exile has achieved perfection.

    -Hugh of St Victor
    c.1127  Didascalicon, bk.3, ch.20.

  • The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.

    -Ted (Edward James) Hughes
      'The  Jaguar'.

  • The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

    -Ted (Edward James) Hughes
      'Stealing Trout on a May Morning'.

  •    It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

    - David Hume
      A  Treatise of Human Nature, bk.2, pt.3, section 3.

  • The two divinest things this world has got, A lovely woman in a rural spot!

    - (James Henry) Leigh Hunt
      'The Story of Rimini', canto 3, l.257^8.

  • The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.

    - (James Henry) Leigh Hunt
      Of Cleopatra.'The Nile'.

  • Science has 'explained'nothing: the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      Views of Holland.

  • Flertallet har aldrig retten pafi   sin side. Aldrig, siger jeg! Det er en af disse samfundslÖgnere, som en fri, t½nkende mand mafi   gÖre oprÖr imod. Hvem er det, som udgÖr flertallet af beboerne i et land? Er det de kloge folk, eller er det de'   dumme? Jeg t½nker, vi fafi  r vaere enige om, at dumme mennesker er tilstede i en ganske forskr½kkelig overv½ldende majoritet rundt omkring pafi   den hele vide jord. The majority never has right on its side.Never,I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against.Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over.

    - HenrikJohan Ibsen
      En folkefiende (An Enemy of  the People), act 4.

  • Omnis cupidus at avarus contra naturam nititur et molitur. Natura namque pauperem adducit in mundum; natura pauperem reducit a mundo. Every covetous and avaricious man struggles and strives against nature.Fornature bringshim intotheworld poor, and takes him out of it poor.

    -Pope Innocent III originally Lotario de' Conti di Segni
      De Miseraria Condicionis Humanae, bk.2, ch.12.

  • An Artist of the Floating World.

    - Kazuo Ishiguro
       Title of novel.

  • God passes through the thicket of the world, and wherever his glance falls he turns all things to beauty.

    -StJohn of the Cross originally Juan deYepes yAŁ   lvarez
    Ca  ntico espiritual (translated by K Kavanaugh and O Rodriguez as The Spiritual Canticle).

  • A process of genocide is being carried out before the eyes of the world.

    -PopeJohn Paul II originally Karol Jozef Wojtyla
      Of the situation in Beirut. In The Independent,16  Aug.

  • There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice, And wake from ignorance the WesternWorld.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
    c.1737  Irene, act 4, sc.1 (first produced1749).

  • Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from letters, to be wise; There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      The Vanity of Human Wishes, l.155^60.

  • Politics are now nothing morethanmeans of rising inthe world.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Remark,18  Apr. Quoted in  James Boswell  The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.

  • The one thing constant in a changing world is the avant- garde.

    - Louis Jouvet
    Attributed.

  • When I behold, upon the night's starred face Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness so sink.

    -John Keats
      'When I Have FearsThat I May Cease to Be'.

  •    Call the world if you please 'The vale of soul-making'.

    -John Keats
      Letter to George and Georgiana Keats,14 Feb.

  • O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Proven c° al song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

    -John Keats
      Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'Ode to a Nightingale', stanza 2.

  • I'm going to visit every country in the world, eat all the food of the world, drink all the drink of the worldand, I hope, make love to every woman in the world. Then I might get a good night's sleep.

    - Brian Keenan
      Said on his release, BBC  T V, 25  Aug.

  • Asthe eaglewas killed by thearrow wingedwith its own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

    - Helen Adams Keller
      In the American Magazine, Dec.

  • Quam cito transit gloria mundi. How quickly the glory of the world passes.

    - StThomas a' Kempis
    c.1413  De Imitatione Christi, bk.1, ch.4, section 6.

  • There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
       Address in Berlin's Rudolf  Wilde Platz, 26  Jun, 22 months after the erection of the wall dividing the city.

  • We in this country, in this generation, areby destiny, rather than choicethe watchmen on the walls of the world.

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
       Address prepared for Dallas luncheon on the day he was assassinated, 22 Nov.

  • What your government believes is its own business; what it does in the world is the world's business.

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
    Letter to Nikita Khrushchev. Quoted in Theodore C Sorensen Kennedy (1965).

  • The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when theyare right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

    -John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes (of Tilton)
      The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

  • I believe there is an unseen world all around us.

    - Stephen King
      Nightmares and Dreamscapes, introduction.

  • When all the world is young, lad, And all the trees are green; And every goose a swan, lad, And every lass a queen; Then hey for boot and horse, lad, And round the world away: Young blood must have its course, lad, And every dog his day.

    - Charles Kingsley
      Song. The Water Babies, ch.2.

  • Winds of the World, give answer! Theyare whimpering to and fro And what should they know of England who only England know? The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'The English Flag'.

  • Little Friend of all the World.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
    Kim's nickname. Kim, ch.1.

  •    We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it'slike, what we'regoing through.We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.

    - Larry (Lawrence) Kramer
      Ned speaking of gay men with  AIDS. The Normal Heart, act 2, sc.11.

  •   How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

    - Karl Kraus
    Aphorism collected in Heinrich Fischer (ed) Beim Wort genommen (1955). Translated by Harry Zohn in Half-truths and one-and-a-half truths (1986).

  • Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; Oh life, no life, but lively form of death; Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs.

    -Thomas Kyd
    c.1589  The Spanish Tragedy, act 3, sc.2.

  • En ve  rite  , plus je vis, et plus je suis tente   de croire qu'il n'y a que vous et moi dans le monde, qui valions quelque chose. Intruth, themore I live, themore Iamtemptedtobelieve that only you and I are of any value at all in the world.

    - Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
      Les Liaisons dangereuses, letter100.

  •    Tout au monde est me"  le   d'amertume et de charmes: La guerre a ses douceurs, l'hymen a ses alarmes. Everything in the world is a mixture of the sweet and the sour: War has its own sweetness and marriage its alarms.

    -Jean de La Fontaine
      Fables, pt.3, no.1,'Le meunier, son fils et l'a"  ne'.

  • Un seul e"  tre vous manque, et tout est de  peuple  . One being only is wanting, and your whole world is bereft of people.

    - Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
      Me  ditations poe  tiques,'L'Isolement'.

  • This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.

    - Charles Lamb
      Letter to Thomas Manning, 26 Dec. Collected in E  W Marrs (ed) Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol.3 (1978).

  • In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopedia behind the rest of the world.

    - Charles Lamb
      Essays of Elia,'The Old and the New Schoolmaster'.

  • If the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,if you did not come inonthewife'sside,if youdid not sneak intothehouse in her train, but were an old friend in first habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,look about you† Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world.

    - Charles Lamb
      Essays of Elia,'A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People'.

  • I cannot tell where you should look for me, if you send out any pinnace to seek me; because I live at the devotion of the wind and seas. And thus fare you well; desiring God to send us a merry meeting in this world, if it be his good will and pleasure.

    - SirJames Lancaster
    c.1594  Letter to the East India Company written on the homeward voyage when the two English ships ran into storms off the Cape of Good Hope. Lancaster's ship lost her rudder. Unwilling torisk theother ship, Lancaster orderedher captain to sail straight home, taking the letter with him.  A voyage with three tall ships, the Penelope, admirall, the Marchant Royall, vice- admiral, and the Edward Bonaventure, rear-admiral, to the East Indies† Begun By M. George Raymond, in the yeere1591, and performed by M.  James Lancaster; and written from the mouth of Edmund Barker of Ipswich (his lieutenant in the sayd voyage) by M. Richard Hakluyt.

  •    Then let us have our libertyagain, And challenge to yourselves no sovereignty. You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; Your fault being greater, why should you disdain Our being your equals, free from tyranny?

    - Aemilia Lanyer
    Salve Deus Ex Judaeorum,'Eve's  Apology in Defense of Women'.

  • In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne, I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were, In habite an heremite unholy of werkes, Went wide in this world wondres to here.

    -William Langland
    c.1377  Piers Plowman (B text), prologue, l.1^4. (shoop = got, shroudes = garments)

  • We declare: the genius of our days to be: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, aeroplanes, railways, magnificent shipswhat an enchantmentwhat a great epoch unrivalled in world history. 490

    - Mikhail Larionov
      'Rayonnist Manifesto', quoted in C Gray  The Russian Experiment in  Art (revised edn1986).

  • Si la morale de Cle  opa" t re e u" t e  te   moins courte, la face du monde aurait change  . Son nez n'en serait pas devenu plus long. If Cleopatra's morality had been less short, the face of the world would have been altered. Her nose would not thereby have grown longer.

    - Comte de properly Isidore Ducasse Lautre  amont
      Poe  sies, pt.2.

  • Men! The onlyanimal in the world to fear.

    - D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
      'Mountain Lion'.

  • Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

    - D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
      Women in Love, ch.11.

  • The Pobble who has no toes Had once as manyas we; When they said,'Some day you may lose them all'; He replied'Fish fiddle de-dee!' His Aunt Jobiska made him drink Lavender water tinged with pink, For she said,'The world in general knows There's nothing so good for a Pobble's toes!'

    - Edward Lear
    NonsenseSongs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Pobble Who Has No Toes'.

  • As for mefor me, the grass grew longer, and more sorrowful, and the trees were surfaced like flesh, and girls were no longer to be treated lightly but were creatures of commanding sadness, and all journeys through the valley were now made alone, with passion in every bush, and the motions of wind and cloud and stars were suddenly for myself alone, and voices elected me of all men living and called me to deliver the world, and I groaned from solitude, blushed when I stumbled, loved strangers and bread and butter, and made long trips through the rain on my bicycle, stared wretchedly through lighted windows, grinned wryly to think how little I was known, and lived in a state of raging excitement.

    - Laurie Lee
      Cider With Rosie,'Last Days'.

  • My imaginationmakesmehumanandmakesmea fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

    - Ursula ne  e Kroeber Le Guin
      'Winged Creatures On My Mind', in Harper's,  Aug.

  • Igreet you as the advanceguard of the world proletarian army. The hour is not far off when†the German people will turn their weapons againsttheircapitalist exploiters. The sun of the socialist revolution has already risen.

    -Vladimir Ilyich originally Vladimir IlyichUlyanov Lenin
      Speech, Petrograd,16  Apr.

  • It occurred to her that she wasgoing mad† Yet it did not seem to her that she was even slightly mad; but rather that people who were not as obsessed as she was with the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers were all out of touch with an awful necessity.

    - Doris May ne  e Tayler Lessing
      The Golden Notebook,'Free Women 5'.

  • The world is not with us enough. SeeWordsworth 925:4.

    - Denise Levertov
      O  Taste and See,'O  Taste and See'.

  • The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.What a very feware acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

    - Primo Levi
      Other People's Trades,'News from the Sky' (translated by Raymond Rosenthal,1989).

  •    Then down came the lidthe day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo.World-politics stepped in, and a war was started whichhasnot ended yet: 'a war to end war'.But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

    -Jose Lezama Lima
      Blasting and Bombardiering, pt.5,'Toward an  Art-Less Society'.

  •    An account†of the decadence occupying the trough between the two world wars introduces us to a moronic inferno of insipidityand decay.

    - (Percy) Wyndham Lewis
      Rude Assignment, ch.31.

  • Once he has stolen his100,100 thalers a rogue can walk through the world an honest man.

    - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
    c.1784^1788  Aphorisms, Notebook H (translated by R  J Hollingdale,1990).

  • The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated [this ground], far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but itcannever forget what they did here.

    - Abraham Lincoln
      Dedication address, Gettysburg NationalCemetery,19 Nov.

  •    It is a great war for the emancipation of Europe from the thralldom of a military caste which has thrown its shadows upon two generations of men, and is now plunging theworld intoawelterof bloodshedand death.

    - David, 1st Earl Lloyd George (of Dwyfor)
      Speech in Queen's Hall, London, 21 Sep.

  • A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. He that has those two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them will be little the better for anything else. See Juvenal 453:20.

    -John Locke
      Some Thoughts Concerning Education, opening words.

  • The world isaglobal campus,Hilary, you'd betterbelieve it. The American Express card has replaced the library pass.

    - David John Lodge
      Small World, pt.1, ch.2.

  • His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man.

    - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
      'The VillageBlacksmith', stanza 2. Collectedin Ballads and other Poems (1841).

  • Our ingress into the world Was naked and bare; Our progress through the world Is trouble and care.

    - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
      Tales of a WaysideInn, pt.2,'The Student's Tale: The Cobbler of Hagenau'.

  • The men that women marry, And why they marry them, will always be A marvel and a mystery to the world.

    - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
      Michael  Angelo, pt.1, sc.5.

  • I would rather have a Scot come from Scotland togovern the people of this kingdom well and justly, than that you should govern them ill in the sight of all the world.

    - Konrad Lorenz
       To his son, Louis, at Fontainebleau.

  • Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

    -James Russell Lowell
      'Rousseau and the Sentimentalists', in the North  American Review,  Jul.

  • Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.

    -William Lowndes
      Under the Volcano, ch.3.

  • That is the worst thing about being a middle-class woman†you have more knowledge of yourself and the world: you are equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make.

    - Alison Lurie
      The War Between The Tates, ch.3.

  • Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world.

    - Alison Lurie
    The Language of Clothes.

  • It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place this world is when one is playing golf.

    - Robert Lynd
    Attributed. British journalist  and writer.  His  critique of feminism,  No  More SexWar:The Failures of Feminism, was published in1992.

  • The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point†but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

    - Douglas MacArthur
      Address to Congress after being relieved of his duty by President Truman,19 Apr.

  • Every manwho has seen the world knowsthat nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

    -1st Baron
      'Machiavelli', in the Edinburgh Review, Mar.

  • We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of humannaturesostriking, and sogrotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stockinghalf Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison inone pocket, and a quire of bad verses in the other.

    -1st Baron
      Of Frederick the Great. Historical Essays.'Frederic the Great', in the Edinburgh Magazine,  Apr.

  • Thus ourdemocracy was, froman early period, themost aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic in the world.

    -1st Baron
      History of England,  vol.1, ch.1.

  •    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

    -Joseph R(aymond) McCarthy
      Of Catholicism. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,'To the Reader'.

  • The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweetand breaks the heart.

    -Grieve
      Stony Limits and other poems,'The Little White Rose'.

  • Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

    - Archibald MacLeish
      A  Time to Speak,'Of the Librarian's Profession'.

  • Poets†are literal-minded menwho will squeeze a word till it hurts.

    - Archibald MacLeish
      'Apologia', in the Harvard Law Review,  Jun.

  • Thenewelectronic independencerecreatestheworld in the image of a global village.

    - (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan
      The Gutenberg Galaxy.

  • Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

    - (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan
      'Canada:  A Borderline Case', CBC radio broadcast, 29 May.

  • World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. McNeil

    - (Frederick) Louis MacNeice
      Poems,'Snow'.

  • We are living in a material world And I am a material girl.

    -Madonna full name Madonna LouiseVeronica Ciccone
      'Material Girl'.

  • A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.

    - Gustav Mahler
      In conversation with Sibelius. Quoted in Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser  A Dictionary of Musical Quotations (1985).

  • New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one- trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle. St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

    - Norman Kingsley Mailer
      Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'The Siege of Chicago'.

  •    'What tydynges at Camelot?'seyde that on knyght.'By my hede, there have I been and aspied the courte of kynge Arthure, and there ys such a felyshyp that they may never be brokyn, and well-nyghe all the world holdith with Arthure, for there ys the floure of chevalry.'

    - SirThomas   d.1471 Malory
    c.1470  Morte d'Arthur, bk.3, ch.14.

  •    And so at that tyme sir Launcelot had the grettyste name ofony knyght oftheworlde, and mostehewashonoured of hyghe and lowe.

    - SirThomas   d.1471 Malory
    c.1470  Morte d'Arthur, bk.6, ch.18.

  • A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents onwhom hehas a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.

    -Thomas Robert Malthus
      An Essay on the Principle of Population (revised edn).

  • In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.

    - David Alan Mamet
      Writing in Restaurants,'Notes For a Catalogue for Raymond Saunders'.

  • We live in a world ruined by Reason.

    - David Alan Mamet
      Writing in Restaurants,'Oscars'.

  • The problems of the world, AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution, are, finally, no more solvable than the problems of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and theyare fallingwhat can be done?† What can be done about the problems which beset our life? Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being donethe organism is preparing to rest.

    - David Alan Mamet
      Writing in Restaurants,'Decay: Some Thoughts for  Actors'.

  • If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world could become socialist.

    -Mao Zedong or MaoTse-tung
      Quoted in the Peking Review, 9  Jun1963.

  • People of the world, unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs.

    -Mao Zedong or MaoTse-tung
      Speech,  Jul.

  • We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.

    - Emilio FilippoTomasso Marinetti
      Manifesto of Futurism. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith Italy:  A Modern History (1959), p.270.

  • We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched bya new beauty: the beautyof speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breatha roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot ismore beautiful than theVictory of Samothrace.

    - Emilio FilippoTomasso Marinetti
      Manifesto of Futurism.

  • It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours.With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy beena dealer insecond-hand clothes.Wemean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards. 550

    - Emilio FilippoTomasso Marinetti
      Manifesto of Futurism.

  • Un mari porte un masque avec le monde, et une grimace avec sa femme. A husbandwears a mask intheworld and a smirk withhis wife.

    - Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
      Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard, act1, sc.2.

  • Dans ce monde, il faut e"  tre un peu trop bon pour l'e"  tre assez. In this world, one must be a little too good in order to be good enough.

    - Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
      Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard, act1, sc.2.

  • Nature that framed us of four elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves, and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

    - Christopher Marlowe
      Tamburlaine the Great (published1590), pt.1, act 2, sc.7.

  • And every warrior that is rapt with love Of fame, of valour, and of victory, Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits: I thus conceiving and subduing both, That which hath stopped the tempest of the gods, Even from the fiery-spangled veil of heaven, To feel the lovely warmth of shepherds'flames, And march in cottages of strowe'  d weeds, Shall give the world to note, for all my birth, That virtue solely is the sum of glory, And fashions men with true nobility.

    - Christopher Marlowe
      Tamburlaine the Great (published1590), pt.1, act 5, sc.1.

  •    Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; but where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must we ever be: And, to be short, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not heaven.

    - Christopher Marlowe
    c.1592  Doctor Faustus (published1604), act 2, sc.1.

  • Oh, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour, and omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan!

    - Christopher Marlowe
    c.1592  Doctor Faustus (published1604), act1, sc.1.

  • How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.

    - Christopher Marlowe
    c.1592  Doctor Faustus (published1604), act1, sc.1.

  • Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. The purpose shall be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

    - George C(atlett) Marshall
      Speech at Harvard, 5  Jun, announcing the European Recovery Plan (ER A) that became known as the Marshall Plan.

  • There is not such another in The world, to offer for their sin.

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn' (published1681).

  • Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness Lady were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love's day. Thou by the Indian Ganges'side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood.

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'To His Coy Mistress' (published1681).

  • 'Tis not, what once it was, the world; But a rude heap together hurl'd.

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'Upon  Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax' (published1681), stanza 96.

  • Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou paradise of four seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With watery if not flaming sword; What luckless apple did we taste, To make us mortal, and thee waste?

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'Upon  Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax' (published1681), stanza 41.

  • Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, and the spirit of conditions that are unspiritual. It is the opium of the people.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
    ^4  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

  • The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in powerand extent.The worker becomes anevercheaper commodity the more good he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      Collected in T B Bottomore (trans and ed) Early Writings (1964), p.121.

  • The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      Theses on Feuerbach, no.11.

  •    Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. they have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore,1888), closing words. This translation was approved by Engels, but the phrase is also known as'Workers of the world, unite'. The literal translation of the German is'Proletarians of all lands, unite.'

  •    Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in the world reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, section1.

  • For some time I watch the coming of the night† Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children's children, the power, peace and healing of the night will be obliterated.

    - Peter Matthiessen
      Of the night sky in Nepal. The Snow Leopard,'Northward, October18'.

  • Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

    - Herman Melville
    Moby Dick, ch.42.

  • It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.

    - Herman Melville
    Moby Dick, ch.49.

  • Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegorythe world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended.

    - Herman Melville
      Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nov.

  • No one in this world, so far as I knowand I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help mehas ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
      'Notes on  Journalism' in the Chicago Sunday Tribune,19 Sep. The phrase is commonly quoted as'No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the  American people.'

  • War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
    'Minority Report'. Collected in Notebooks (1956).

  •   Affairs of the world he could treat competently; he had a head for high politics and the management of men; the femininehalfoftheworldwasa confusionandavexation to his intelligence, characterless; and one woman at last appearing decipherable, he fancied it must be owing to her possession of character, a thing prized the more in women because of his latent doubt of its existence.

    - George Meredith
      Percy Dacier's opinion of Diana. Diana of the Crossways, ch.28.

  • Away with systems! Away with a corrupt world! Let us breathe the air of the Enchanted island.Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine-stems. The sun's coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters. The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.

    - George Meredith
      The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ch.19.

  • What one wants in this world isn't so much to'live' as to†be lived, to be used by life for its own purposes.

    -James Ingram Merrill
    Quoted in the NewYorker, 27 Mar1995.

  • There comes a time whenyou haveto let yourclothesgo out in the world and try to make it on their own.

    - Bette Midler
      On relinquishing the mermaid costume she wore in the 1970s film Clams on the Half Shell. In People, 31  Aug.

  • World, world, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew like this; Here such a pattern is As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year: My soul is all but out of melet fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

    - Edna St Vincent Millay
      God's World.

  • They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us.

    - Arthur Miller
      Of the settlers in Salem in1692. The Crucible, act1.

  • The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      The Tropic of Cancer.

  • The world is the mirror of myself dying.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      Black Spring,'Third or Fourth Day of Spring'.

  • I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      Black Spring,'Third or Fourth Day of Spring'.

  • Example moves the world more than doctrine.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      The Cosmological Eye,'An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere'.

  • To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      Sunday  After The War,'Reunion in Brooklyn'.

  • The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      Sexus, ch.9.

  • The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly, underwrite it with their lives.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,'With Edgar Var e' se in the Gobi Desert'.

  • It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      The Wisdom of the Heart,'Creative Death'.

  • I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

    -John Milton
      Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

  • Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout intotheregions of sinand falsity thanby reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

    -John Milton
      Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

  • Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but†a wicked race of deceivers†took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely formintoathousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled bodyof Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them.We have not yet found them all†nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.

    -John Milton
      Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

  • Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, opening lines.

  • There is a place (If ancient and prophetic fame in heav'n Err not) another world, the happy seat Of some new race called Man.

    -John Milton
      Beelzebub. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.2, l.345^8.

  • And fast by hanging in a golden chain This pendent world.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.2, l.1051^2.

  • He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said,'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds This be thy just circumference,O world.'

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.225^31.

  • The great creator from his work returned Magnificent, his six days' work, a world.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.567^8.

  • Witness this new-made world, another heav'n From heaven gate not far, founded in view On the clear hyaline, the glassy sea; Of amplitude almost immense, with stars Numerous, and every star perhaps a world Of destined habitation.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.617^22.

  • Now possess, As lords, a spacious world, to our native heaven Little inferior, by myadventure hard With peril great achieved.

    -John Milton
      Satan, returning triumphantly from Earth to Hell after tempting Eve. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.10, l.466^9.

  • O why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest heav'n With Spirits masculine, create at last This novelty on earth, this fair defect Of nature, and not fill the world at once With men as angels without feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind?

    -John Milton
       Adam speaking of Eve. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.10, l.888^95.

  • This having learnt, thou hast attained the sum Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars Thou knew'st by name, and all th'ethereal powers, All secrets of the deep, all nature's works, Or works of God in heav'n, air, earth, or sea, And all the riches of this world enjoy'dst, And all the rule, one empire; onlyadd Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith, Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love, By name to come called charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far.

    -John Milton
      Michael to  Adam. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.12, l.575^87.

  • Some natural tears theydropped, but wiped themsoon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.12, l.645^9.

  • The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day. Be famous then By wisdom; as thy empire must extend, So let extend thy mind o'er all the world.

    -John Milton
    Paradise Regained, bk.4, l.220^3.

  • Logic doesn't apply to the real world. Mishima

    - Marvin Lee Minsky
      In Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C Dennett (eds)  The Mind's I: fantasies and reflections on self and soul.

  • He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.

    -Yukio pseudonym of  Hiraoka Kimitake Mishima
    Acts ofWorship,'Raisin Bread' (translated byJohn Bester,1989).

  • Land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts. It will come to you, this love of the land.

    - Margaret Mitchell
      Gone  with  the Wind.

  • I see you belong to the category, old friend, which will havethingsintheround, whichdoesloveanend, causes, the balance sheet drawn and equalled.But, mydear Gid, the world is not like thatit is untidy, there are no reasons, the final sum never balances.

    -Timothy Mo
      An Insular Possession, ch.44.

  • Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l'offense, Et ce n'est pas pe  cher que pe  cher en silence. A scandal is that which gives offence to the world. To sin in private is not to sin at all.

    -Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molie'  re
      Le Tartuffe, act 4, sc.5.

  • Everlasting peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one; and war is a necessary part of God's arrangement with the world† Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism.

    - Helmuth von, Count Moltke
      Letter to Dr  J K Bluntschi,11 Dec, collected in Helmuth von Moltke as a Correspondent (1893).

  • 'Tis certain we have but very imperfect accounts of the manners and religion of these people; this part of the world being seldomvisited,but bymerchants, whomind little but their own affairs; or travellers, who make too short a stay to be able to report anything exactly of their own knowledge.

    - Lady Mary Wortley ne  e Pierrepoint Montagu
    c.1716  Of  Turkey. Collected in Lord Wharncliffe (ed)  The Letters and Works of Lady Mary  Wortley Montagu (1837).

  • La plus grande chose du monde, c'est de s c° avoir estre a' soy. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.

    - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
      Essais, bk.1, ch.39 (translated by Charles Cotton).

  • Il n'y a point de fin en nos inquisitions. Nostre fin est en l'autre monde. There is no end to our researches; our end is in the other world.

    - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
      Essays, bk.3, ch.13 (translated by Donald M Frame).

  •    My dear and only love, I pray That little world of thee Be governed by no other sway Than purest monarchy.

    -James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose
    c.1642  'My Dear and Only Love', stanza1.

  • Le gouvernement est comme toutes les choses du monde; pour le conserver, il faut l'aimer. Government is like everything else in the world; to conserve it, we must love it.

    -Bre'  de et de
      De l'esprit des lois, vol.4, ch.5.

  • There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet; Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.

    -Thomas Moore
      Irish Melodies,'The Meeting of the Waters'.

  • Let Erin remember the days of Old, Ere her faithless sons betrayed her; When Malachi wore the collar of gold Which he won from her proud invader; When her kings, with standards of green unfurled, Led the Red-Branch Knights to danger; Ere the emerald gem of the western world Was set in the crown of a stranger.

    -Thomas Moore
      Irish Melodies,'Let Erin Remember'.

  •    Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe.It madethem intosomething else, it made themslave masters, it madethem crazy.You can't dothat for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves.

    -Toni Chloe Anthony ne  e Wofford Morrison
    Quoted in Paul Gilroy Small  Acts (1993),'Living memory: a meeting with Toni Morrison'.

  • As a military man who has given half a century of active service,Isay inall sincerity thatthenucleararmsracehas no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons; their existence onlyadds to our perils because of the illusions that they have generated. The world now stands on the brink of the final abyss. Let us all resolve to take all possible practicable steps to ensurethat we donot, through ourownfolly, go over the edge.

    - 1st Earl Nicholas
      Speech at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg,11 May.

  • Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came.

    - Edwin Muir
      One Foot in Eden,'The Horses'.

  • One foot in Eden still, I stand And look across the other land. The world's great day isgrowing late, Yet strange these fields that we have planted So long with crops of love and hate.

    - Edwin Muir
      One Foot in Eden,'One Foot in Eden'.

  • Red-and-gold disease†an itch, the theater a place to scratch it†a yearning for the wider world.

    - Herbert Muschamp
      In the NewYork Times, 30  Jul. The phrase'red-and-gold disease' was coined by Lincoln Kirstein's mother when her son began haunting theatres.

  • China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.

    -Napoleon I
    c.1800   Attributed.

  •    My verse represents a handle I can grasp in order not to yield to the centrifugal forces which are trying to throw me off the world.

    - (Frederic) Ogden Nash
    Recalled on his death, 9 May1971.

  • If I be evil intreated, or sent away with a flea in mine ear, let him look that Iwill rail onhimsoundly; nor foranhour or a day, whiles the injury is fresh in my memory; but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the world when I am dead, to be a living image to all ages of his beggarly parsimony and ignoble illiberality.

    -Thomas Nashe
      Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil, 'An Invective Against Enemies of Poetry'.

  • May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

    -John Henry Newman
      'Wisdom and Innocence', collected in Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day.

  • I know not what I mayappear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

    - Sir Isaac Newton
    Quoted in D Brewster (ed) Memoirs of Newton (1855), vol.2, ch.27.

  • Sie schafft immer dieWelt nach ihrem Bilde, sie kann nicht anders; Philosophie ist dieser tyrannischeTreib selbst, der geistigsteWille zur Macht, zur 'Schaffung der Welt'. It [philosophy] alwayscreatestheworld inits ownimage, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, themost spiritual will topower, to'creationof the world'.

    - FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche
      Jenseits von Gut und Bo«  se (Beyond Good and Evil), section 9 (translated by R  J Hollingdale).

  • In the final analysis, all architecture reveals the application of human ingenuity to the satisfaction of human needs. And among these needs are not only shelter, warmth and accommodation, but also the needs, felt at every moment in every part of the world in endlessly different ways, for something more profound, evocative and universal, for beauty, for permanence, for immortality.

    - Patrick Nuttgens
      'The Nature of  Architecture', in Ben Farmer and Hentie Louw (eds) Companion to Contemporary  Architectural Thought (1993).

  • Th' whole worl's in a state o'chassis!

    - Da i bh|  dh OŁ    Bruadair
      Boyle speaking.  Juno and the Paycock, act1.

  • The underlying motive of many Socialists is, I believe, a hypertrophied sense of order†what they desire, basically, istoreducetheworld tosomething resembling a chessboard.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      The Road to Wigan Pier, ch.11.

  • The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      'Riding Down from Bangor'.

  • Is the world Reform'd since our last meeting?

    -Thomas Otway
      Venice Preserved, or a Plot Discovered, act1, sc.1.

  • No, this vile world and I have long been jangling, And cannot part on better terms than now, When only men like thee are fit to live in't.

    -Thomas Otway
      Venice Preserved, or a Plot Discovered, act 4, sc.2.

  • All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

    - Robert Owen
    Attributed. Said to his partner W  Allen when they ended their business relationship.

  • 'Strange friend,' I said,'here is no cause to mourn.' 'None,'said the other,'save the undone years, The hopelessness.Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world.'

    -Wilfred Owen
      'Strange Meeting', collected in Poems (published1920).

  • Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroysmy property, and kills or threatenstokill me or those that are in it, and to'bind me in all cases whatsoever'to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?

    -Thomas Paine
      The Crisis, introduction, Dec.

  • My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

    -Thomas Paine
    ^2  The Rights of Man.

  • Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world.That'swhy it almost alwayshastobe onthesideof the underdog.

    - Grace ne  e  Goodside Paley
      In Ms magazine.

  • England is one of the greatest powers of the world. No event or series of events bearing on the balance of power, or on probabilities of peace or war, can be matters of indifferencetoher, and herrighttohaveand to express opinions onmattersthusbearingonher interests is unquestionable.

    - HenryJohnTemple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
      Letter to QueenVictoria, 23 Aug.

  • Upon my honour, I saw a Madonna Standing in a niche Above the door of the private whore Of the world's worst son of a bitch.

    - Dorothy ne  e Rothschild Parker
    Jotted into the visitor's book ofWilliam Randolph Hearst's house at San Simeon after she had seen a Della Robbia Madonna over the entrance to Marion Davies's bedroom. Quoted in R Hughes Culture of Complaint (1994).

  • Why should not the name of an Australian be equal to that of a Briton†to that of a citizen of the proudest country under the sun? Make yourselves a united people, appear before the world as one, and the dream of going 'home' will die away.

    - Sir Henry Parkes
      Speech to theAustralian Federation Conference, Feb.

  • The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.

    - Boris Pasternak
      When It Clears Up (translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater).

  • I am imbued with two deep impressions; the first, that science knows no country; the second, which seems to contradict the first, although it is really a direct consequence of it†that science is the highest personification of the nation. Science knows no country because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

    - Louis Pasteur
      Toast at the banquet of the International Congress of Sericulture (translated by Rene   Dubois).

  • In all museums throughout the world one may see plaster casts of footprints of weird animals, footprints preserved for posterity, not because the animals were particularly good of their sort, but because they had the luck to walkon the lava while it was cooling. There is just a faint hope that something of the same sort may happen to us.

    - Banjo (Andrew Barton) Paterson
    Of Henry Lawson and himself writing in a new land. Quoted in Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie A Literary Heritage: 'Banjo' Paterson (1988), introduction.

  • Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power†but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.

    - Octavio Paz
      Alternating Current.

  •    I have got the North Pole out of my system after twenty- three years of effort, hard work, disappointments, hardships, privations, more or less suffering, and some risks† The work is the finish, the cap and climax of nearly four hundred years of effort, loss of life, and expenditure of fortunes by the civilized nations of the world, and it has been accomplished in a way that is thoroughly American. I am content.

    - Robert Edwin Peary
      Diary entry, Apr. Quoted inTheNorth Pole (published1910).

  •    In a march of onlya few hours, I had passed from the western to the eastern hemisphere and had verified my position at the summit of the world.It was hard to realise that on the first miles of the brief march we had been travelling due north, while on the last few miles of the same march we had been travelling due south, although we had all the time been travelling precisely in the same direction.

    - Robert Edwin Peary
      Description of crossing and then passing the Pole. The North Pole (published1910).

  •    The evil inthisworld iscommitted by thespiritual fatcats who think that they are without sin because theyare unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self- examination.

    - M(organ) Scott Peck
      What Return Can I Make?

  • As Einstein once said, ordinary life in an ordinary day in the modern world is a dreary business. I mean dreary. People will do anything just to escape this dreariness.

    - Samuel Pepys
      Interview in Esquire, Dec.

  • Thus our twin souls in one shall grow, And teach the world new love, Redeem the age and sex, and show A flame fate dares not move: And courting death to be our friend, Our lives, together too, shall end.

    - Katherine ne  e Fowler Philips
      'To Mrs. M. A. at Parting'.

  • Though others before him had triumphed three times, Pompeius, by having gained his first triumph over Libya, his second over Europe, and this the last over Asia, seemed in a manner to have brought the whole world into his three triumphs.

    -Plutarch
    Referring to Pompey's victories against the Marian party in Africa, in Spain, and against Mithridates in Asia Minor (c.62 Parallel Lives,'Pompeius', ch.45. ). BC

  • Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merelyflowers.

    - EdgarAllan Poe
      'Israfel', stanza 7.

  • The death†of a beautifulwomanis, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.

    - EdgarAllan Poe
      'The Philosophy of Composition', in Graham's Magazine, Apr.

  • Now it came to pass†that theTartars made them a King whosenamewas Chinghis Kaan[Genghis Khan].Hewas a manof great worth, and of great ability, and valour. And as soon as the news that he had been chosen King was spread abroad through those countries, all theTartars in the world came to him and owned him for their Lord.

    - Marco Polo
    c.1310  Quoted in Col. HenryYule (ed and trans) The Book of Ser Marco Polo, theVenetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East (1871), 2 vols.

  • Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.

    - Alexander Pope
      The Rape of the Lock, canto 2, l.52.

  • How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

    - Alexander Pope
      'Eloisa to Abelard'.

  •    Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.87^90.

  • Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 2, l.15^18.

  • In faith and hope the world will disagree, But all mankind's concern is charity.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 3, l.307^8.

  • You think this cruel? take it for a rule, No creature smarts so little as a fool. Let peals of laughter,Codrus! round thee break, Thou unconcerned canst hear the mighty crack. Pit, box, and gallery in convulsions hurled, Thou stand'st unshook amidst a bursting world.

    - Alexander Pope
      'An Epistle to DrArbuthnot', l.83^8.

  • Still round and round the ghosts of Beauty glide, And haunt the places where their honour died. See how the world its veterans rewards! Ayouth of frolics, an old age of cards.

    - Alexander Pope
      Epistles to Several Persons,'To a Lady', l.241^4.

  • There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

    - Sir Karl Raimund Popper
      The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol.2, ch.25.

  • There is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking men are interested. It is the problem of cosmology: the problem of understanding the worldincluding ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world. All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than that of science, lies solely in the contributions which it has made to it.

    - Sir Karl Raimund Popper
      The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), preface to1959 edition.

  • Of all those young women Not one has enquired the cause of the world Nor the modus of lunar eclipses Nor whether there be any patch left of us After we cross the infernal ripples.

    - Ezra Loomis Pound
      Quia PauperAmavi,'Homage to Sextus Propertius'.

  • Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

    - Ezra Loomis Pound
      The Pisan Cantos, no.81.

  •    It was the same world then as nowthe same, Except for little differences of speed And power, and means to treat myopia To show an axe-blade infinitely sharp Splitting things infinitely small.

    - EdwinJohn Pratt
      Towards theLast Spike.The poet is speaking of the building of the Canadian National Railway, from coast to coast. English Labour politician, Deputy Prime Minister since1997.

  • The earth is nobler than the world we have put upon it.

    -J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley
      Johnson OverJordan, act 3.

  • It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

    - Sir V(ictor) S(awdon) Pritchett
      The Myth Makers,'Pasternak'.

  • Abandon yourself to Nature's truths, and let nothing in this world be unknown to you.

    - Fran c° ois Rabelais
    Quoted inJ H Plumb (ed) The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (1961).

  • If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd's tongue These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. See Marlowe 553:17.

    - Sir Walter Raleigh
    c.1592  'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd', a response to Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love', attributed to Raleigh.

  • It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

    - Sir Herbert Edward Read
      Quoted in Hoggart andJohnston, An Idea of Europe (1987), 'Pyramids and Planes'.

  • Ten DaysThat Shook the World.

    -John Reed
      Title of book.

  • The point is the seeingthe grace beyond recognition, the ways of the bird rising, unnamed, unknown, beyond the range of language, beyond its noun. Eyes open on growing, flying, happening, and go on opening. Manifold, the world dawns on unrecognizing, realizing eyes. Amazement is the thing. Not love, but the astonishment of loving.

    - Alastair Reid
      Weathering,'Growing, Flying, Happening'.

  •   Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.

    - Pierre Auguste Renoir
    Quoted in Ian Chilvers and Harold Osborne (eds) The Oxford Dictionary of Art (1994).

  • El orbe hispano nunca se vino abajo, ni siquiera a la ca|da del imperio espan‹  ol, sino que se ha multiplicado en numerosas facetas de ensanches todav|a insospechados† No somos pueblos en estado de candor, que se deslumbren fa  cilmente con los instrumentos externos de que se acompan‹  a la cultura, sino pueblos que heredan una vieja civilizacio  n y exigen la excelencia misma de la cultura. The Hispanic world never crumbled, not even after the Spanish Empire fell, but instead has multiplied itself in broad ways that are still largely unknown† Our people are not naive and are not blinded by the external tools that go together with culture; we are rather the inheritors of an old civilization, and we demand the excellence proper to culture itself.

    - Alfonso Reyes
    Pa  ginas escogidas,'Valor de la literatura hispanoamericana' (translated as'TheValue of Hispanic American Literature').

  • The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.Like whentheysay 'Asit wasin the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end'.

    -Jean pseudonym of  Ellen Gwendolen Rees Williams Rhys
      Voyage in the Dark, ch.4, pt.1.

  • Car loin de le [le lecteur] ne  gliger, l'auteur aujourd'hui proclame l'absolu besoin qu'il a de son concours actif, conscient, cre  ateur. Ce qu'il lui demande, ce n'est plus de recevoir tout fait un monde acheve  , plein, clos sur lui- me"  me, c'est au contraire de participer a'   une cre  ation, d'inventer a'   son tour l'½uvreet le mondeet d'apprendre ainsi a'   inventer sa propre vie. Far from neglecting him [the reader], the author today proclaims the absolute necessity of the reader's active, conscious and creative assistance.What he demands of the reader is no longer to receive a ready-made world, complete, full, closed in upon itself.On the contrary, the reader isasked toparticipateinthe creation, toinvent for himself aworkand the worldand tounderstand thus how to invent his own life.

    - Alain Robbe-Grillet
      Pour un nouveau roman.

  • The world is†a kind of kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.

    - Edwin Arlington Robinson
      Literature in the Making.

  • Will you please tell me what you do with all the vice presidents a bank has?† The United Statesisthebiggest business institution in the world and they only have one vice president and nobody has ever found anything for him to do.

    -Will Rogers
      Speech, International Bankers'Association.

  • Where, after all, do human rights begin? They begin in small places, close to homeso close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world.

    - (Anna) Eleanor Roosevelt
      Quoted in the NewYorkTimes, 26 Dec.

  • Inthefieldof world policy,Iwoulddedicatethisnationto the policy of the good neighbour.

    - Franklin D(elano) Roosevelt
      Inaugural address, 4 Mar.

  • In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms.The first isfreedom of speech and expression, everywhere in the world.The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, everywhere in the world.The third is freedom from want† The fourth is freedom from fear.

    - Franklin D(elano) Roosevelt
      Third inaugural address, 6 Jan.

  • We are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny.Germany has become a menace to the whole world. She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.

    -Theodore Roosevelt
      Speech at Oyster Bay, Long Island, Apr.

  • If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game† In a world haunted by thehydrogenand napalm bomb, thefootball field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested.

    - Sir Stanley Rous
      Quoted in Bryon Butler The Official History of the Football Association (1986).

  • He is without strict doubt a Hoorah Henry, and he is generally figured as nothing but a lob as far as doing anything useful in this world is concerned.

    - (Alfred) Damon Runyon
      Money from Home,'Tight Shoes'.

  •    Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

    -John Ruskin
    ^3  The Stones ofVenice, vol.i, ch.2.

  • A poet's work† To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

    - (Ahmed) Salman Rushdie
      The SatanicVerses, pt.2.

  • The greatest thing a humansoul everdoes in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.

    -John Ruskin
      Modern Painters, vol.3, pt.4, ch.16.

  • Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

    - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
      The Problems of Philosophy, ch.1.

  • Ever since I was engaged on Principia Mathematica, I have had a certainmethod of whichat first Iwasscarcely conscious, but which has gradually become more explicit in my thinking. The method consists in an attempt to build a bridge between the world of sense and the world of science.

    - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
      My Philosophical Development, ch.16.

  • As Michael read the Gaelic scroll It seemed the story of the soul; And those who wrought, lest there should fail From earth the legend of the Gael, Seemed warriors of Eternal Mind Still holding in a world gone blind, From which belief and hope had gone, The lovely magic of its dawn.

    - GeorgeWilliam pseudonym  Ó Russell
      The Interpreters,'Michael'.

  • In ancient shadows and twilights Where childhood had strayed, The world's great sorrows were born And its heroes were made. In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.

    - GeorgeWilliam pseudonym  Ó Russell
      Enchantment and Other Poems,'Germinal'.

  • When Dal | hallucinated†the whole world hallucinated with him.

    -John Russell
      On Salvador Dal | 's death. In the NewYorkTimes, 24 Jan. novel,  Elizabeth and her German Garden  (1898).  After his death in  1910   she   married   Francis,   2nd   Earl   Russell,   brother   of Bertrand  (1916,  separated 1919).  In  later  life  she  spent  much time in the US, where she enjoyed considerable popularity.

  • Themost beautiful house intheworld isthe onethat you build for yourself.

    -Witold Marian Rybczynski
    Quoted by PamelaYoung in Maclean's,19 Jun1989.

  • The House of Lords must be the only institution in the world that is kept efficient by the persistent absenteeism of its members.

    - Herbert Louis, 1st Viscount Samuel Samuel
      In American News Review, 5 Feb.

  • Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.

    - Carl Sandburg
      Chicago Poems,'Chicago'.

  • Dear World,Iam leaving because Iam bored.IfeelIhave lived long enough.I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.Good luck.

    - George Sanders
      His suicide note.

  • Qu'est-ce que signifie que l'existence pre  ce'  de l'essence? Cela signifie que l'homme existe d'abord, se rencontre, surgit dans le monde, et qu'il se de  finit apre'  s. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? Wemeanthat manfirst of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the worldand defines himself afterwards.

    -Jean-Paul Sartre
      L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism and Humanism,1948) (translated by Philip Mairet).

  • We are cursed,Waldo, born cursed from the time our mothersbring usintotheworld tilltheshroudsare puton us.

    -Iron
      Lyndall.The Story of an African Farm, ch.17,'Lyndall'.

  • Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, emptyas paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. 722

    - F(rancis) R(eginald) Scott
      Of Canada.'Laurentian Shield'.

  • Ye ken weel eneugh that women and gear are at the bottom of a'the mischief in this warld.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      Rob Roy to Francis Osbaldistone. Rob Roy, ch.35.

  • I would like to be there, were it but to see how the cat Scottish Metrical Psalms jumps.Oneknowsnothingoftheworld,if youareabsent from it so long as I have been.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      Journal,7 Oct, expressing frustration and wonder at the machinations of London bureaucracy which prevented him accessing government papers for his Life of Napoleon.

  • We [the English] seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

    - SirJohn Robert Seeley
      The Expansion of England.

  • J'ai choisi mon peuple noir peinant, mon peuple paysan, toute la race paysanne, par le monde. I chose my black people struggling, my country people, all country people, in the world.

    - Le  opold Se  dar Senghor
      Chants d'ombre,'Que m'accompagnent ka  ra et balafong, 3'.

  • God, in his view, had created a perfect world if the book of Genesis was to be believed and it had been going downhill ever since.

    -Tom (Thomas Ridley) Sharpe
      Wilt, ch.17.

  • If any writer thinks the world is full of middle-class people of nice sensibilities, then he is out of his mind.

    -Tom (Thomas Ridley) Sharpe
      In the Observer, 3 Feb.

  • Money is indeed the most important thing in the world: and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      The Irrational Knot, preface.

  • When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      DonJuan. Man and Superman, act 3.

  • The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying toadapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Man and Superman,'Maxims for Revolutionists: Reason'.

  • My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Peter Keegan to Nora Reilly.John Bull's Other Island, act 2.

  • There are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Tom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, act 4.

  • I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Lady Utterword to Hector Hushabye. Heartbreak House, act1.

  • It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Captain Shotover. Heartbreak House, act 2.

  • If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

    - George Bernard Shaw
    Attributed.

  •    Cambodiawasnot a mistake; it was a crime.The world is diminished by the experience.

    -William Shawcross
      Sideshow, afterword.

  • The discussion of any subject is a right that you have brought into the world with your heart and tongue. Resign your heart's blood before you part with this inestimable privilege of man.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      An Address to the Irish People.

  • The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us,visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'.

  • The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things, bya law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle. Why not I with thine?

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Love and Philosophy'.

  • Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'To a Skylark', stanza 8.

  • Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen thenas I am listening now.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'To a Skylark', stanza 21.

  • You will see Coleridgehe who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind, Which, through its own internal lighting blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls You will see Huntone of those happy souls Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom This world would smell like what it isa tomb.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Letter to Maria Gisborne' l.202^11.

  • For she was beautifulher beauty made The bright world dim, and everything beside Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'TheWitch of Atlas', stanza12.

  • From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Adonais, stanza19.

  •    He has out-soared the shadow of our night; Envyand calumnyand hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Adonais, stanza 40.

  •    The beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Epipsychidion', l.154^9.

  • Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futuritycastsuponthepresent; thewordswhichexpress what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    A Defence of Poetry.

  • The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Hellas', l.1060^5.

  • O cease! must hate and death return, Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Hellas', l.1096^101.

  • Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.

    - Richard Brinsley Sheridan
      Mrs Malaprop.The Rivals, act 3, sc.3.

  • Even the moon is frightened of me, frightened to death! The whole world is frightened to death!

    - R(obert) C(edric) Sherriff
      Line delivered by Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (with PhilipWylie).

  • Whatever may have been my enthusiasm or impatience to be up and doing on the night before, the hour for getting up always finds me with no other ambition in the world than to be permitted to lie where I am and sleep, sleep, sleep.Not soTilman.Ihave never met anyonewith such a complete disregard for the sublime comforts of the early morning bed. However monstrously early we might decide, thenight before, toget up, hewas about at least half an hour before the time. He was generally very good about it, and used to sit placidly smoking his pipe over the fire.

    - Eric Earle Shipton
      On climbing with H W (Bill) Tilman. Nanda Devi.

  • [Nature's] world isbrazen, thepoets onlydeliveragolden.

    - Sir Philip Sidney
      The Defence of Poetry.

  • The humble people of Cambodia are the most wonderful in the world.Their great misfortune is that theyalwayshaveterrible leaders who makethemsuffer.I am not sure I was much better myself, but perhaps I was the least bad.

    - Prince Norodom Sihanouk
      In an interview withWilliam Shawcross, author of Sideshow (1979).

  • When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun roseand set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle.Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?† What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my country?

    -Sitting Bull real name Tatanka Iyotake
    c.1866  Quoted inT C McLuhan Touch the Earth (1973).

  • Those trains will run over their tails, if they can, Snorting and sporting like porpoises. Flee The burly, the whirligig wheels of the train, As round as the world and as large again.

    - Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
      Fa c° ade,'Mariner Man'.

  • Still falls the Rain Dark as the world of man, black as our loss Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the cross.

    - Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
      'The Raids,1940. Night and Dawn'.

  • The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.

    - Sir (Francis) Osbert Sitwell
      The ScarletTree, bk.4, ch.2.

  • Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

    -John French Sloan
    Recalled on his death,7 Sep1951, and quoted in the Smithsonian, Apr1988.

  • We have the happiest Africans in the world.

    - Ian Douglas Smith
    In the Observer, 28 Nov.

  • The greatest deliberative body in the world†has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.

    - Margaret Chase Smith
      'Declaration of Conscience'address to the Senate,1 Jun, denouncing accusations by SenatorJoseph R McCarthy.

  • Drinking the best tea in the world in an empty cricket groundthat, I think, is the final pleasure left to man.

    - C(harles) P(ercy), 1st Baron Snow
      Quoted in ColinJarmanThe Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  • The official world, the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotismshe disliked them all.

    - C(harles) P(ercy), 1st Baron Snow
      Homecomings, ch.22.This phrase was later used as the title of his1964 novel, Corridors of Power.

  • In not much over a generation, physicists have changed our world.

    - C(harles) P(ercy), 1st Baron Snow
    The Physicists (published posthumously).

  • Consider: only one bullet in ten thousand kills a man. Ask: was so much expenditure justified On the death of one so young and so silly Stretched under the olive trees,Oh, world,Oh, death?

    - Sir Stephen Harold Spender
      'Regum Ultimo Ratio'.

  • But reading is not idleness†it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

    - Sir Stephen Harold Spender
      Journal entry, 4 Jan.

  • Of all God's works, which do this world adorn, There is no one more fair and excellent, Then is mans body both for power and form, Whiles it is kept in sober government.

    - Edmund Spenser
      The Faerie Queen, bk.2, canto 9, stanza1.

  •    One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washe'  d it away; Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. 'Vain man,'said she,'that doest in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalise, For I my self shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipe'  d out likewise.' 'Not so,'quod I,'let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name. Where when as death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.'

    - Edmund Spenser
      Amoretti, sonnet 75.

  •    Me seems the world is run quite out of square, And being once amiss grows daily worse and worse.

    - Edmund Spenser
      The Faerie Queen, bk.5, proem, stanza1.

  • If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb, 'a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on'.

    - Bruce Springsteen
    Collected in Gems from Spurgeon (1859).

  • Although woman has performed much of the labor of theworld, her industryand economy have beenthevery means of increasing her degradation.

    - Elizabeth ne  e  Cady Stanton
    The History ofWoman Suffrage1848^61, vol.1, ch.1, 'Preceding Causes'.

  • I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immoralityalmost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them, I would advise all those who wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out ready labelled as entomologists, anthropologists, or whatever other - ology they think suitable and propitious.

    - Dame Freya Madeleine Stark
      TheValleys of theAssassins and other PersianTravels.

  • The Pressisatoncethe eyeand the earand thetongue of the people.It isthe visible speech, if not the voice, of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world.

    -WilliamThomas Stead
      'Government byJournalism', in the Contemporary Review, May. Collected in A Journalist onJournalism (1892).

  •    Photography was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions ofthe everydayness of lifeas a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.

    - Edward Jean Steichen
    Quoted in Dialogue, May1989.

  • 'Pray, my dear,'quoth my mother,'have you not forgot to wind up the clock?''Good G?'cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,'Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?'

    - Laurence Sterne
    67  Tristram Shandy, bk.1, ch.6.

  • 'I'll not hurt thee,'says my uncleToby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand, 'I'll not hurt a hair of thy head:Go,'says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;'go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.'

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.2, ch.12.

  • There is a North-west passage to the intellectual World.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.5, ch.42.

  • I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutterals. It will undo him.

    -Wallace Stevens
      Harmonium,'The Plot Against the Giant'.

  • It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang.

    -Wallace Stevens
      Ideas of Order,'The Idea of Order at KeyWest'.

  • Words of the world are the life of the world.

    -Wallace Stevens
    Quoted in Brendan Gill A NewYork Life (1990).

  • Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There isno evil in the atomonly in men's souls.

    - Adlai E(wing) Stevenson
      Speech, Connecticut,18 Sep.

  • Eggheads of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks.

    - Adlai E(wing) Stevenson
      Presidential election campaign speech.

  • The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
      A Child's Garden ofVerses, no.24,'HappyThought'.

  • The Romans conquered the world not because they held committees but becausethey killed the opposition. That's where I'm coming from.

    - Bill Sweetenham
      In The Independent, 29 Dec.

  • Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.

    -Jonathan Swift
      ATale of aTub,'Epistle Dedicatory'.

  • There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

    -Jonathan Swift
      A Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind.

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

    -Jonathan Swift
    Thoughts onVarious Subjects.

  • Here, where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds'and spent waves'riot In doubtful dreams of dreams.

    - Algernon Charles Swinburne
      Poems and Ballads,'The Garden of Proserpine'.

  • Thou hast conquered,O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey fromThy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

    - Algernon Charles Swinburne
      Poems and Ballads,'Hymn to Proserpine'.

  • Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

    -John Millington Synge
      The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 2.

  • Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.

    -John Millington Synge
      Pegeen Mike.The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 3, closing words.

  • We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow.

    - Leo Szilard
      After an early experiment at Columbia University which proved the possibility of splitting the atom. Quoted inJames B Simpson Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988).

  • And moving through a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'The Lady of Shalott' (revised1842), pt.2, l.46^8.

  • Live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'The Lotos^Eaters', Choric Song, stanza 8, l.154^8.

  • I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, council, governments, Myself not least, but honoured of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windyTroy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Ulysses' (published1842), l.6^24.

  • There lies the port; the vessel, puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheadsyou and I are old: Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices.Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows: for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides: and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and hearth: that which we are, we are: One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Ulysses' (published1842), l.44^70.

  • Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do: For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heaven fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations'airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, Ulysses With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle- flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Locksley Hall', l.117^28.

  • Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Locksley Hall', l.141^2.

  • Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Locksley Hall', l.181^2.

  • The great world's altar-stairs That slope through darkness up to God.

    -Tennyson
      In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 55, l.15^16.

  • He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

    -Tennyson
      'The Eagle', complete poem.

  •    They take the rustic murmur of their bourg For the great wave that echoes round the world.

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'The Marriage of Geraint', l.419^20.

  • The woods decay, the woods decayand fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after manya summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world.

    -Tennyson
      'Tithonus' (revised1864),1.1^7.

  • Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May.

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'The Coming of Arthur', l.481.

  • The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'The Passing of Arthur', l.408^10.

  • If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of.Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'The Passing of Arthur', l.414^23.

  • Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

    -William Makepeace Thackeray
    ^8  Concluding words.Vanity Fair, ch.67.

  • If one leads a country such as Britaina strong country that has taken a lead in world affairs in good times and bad, that isalwaysreliable, thenyou must haveatouch of iron about you.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      In TheTimes.

  • A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

    - Dylan Marlais Thomas
      Quite Early One Morning,'On Poetry'.

  •    The last light has gone out of the world, except This moonlight lying on the grass like frost Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow.

    - (Philip) Edward Thomas
      'Liberty'.

  • It is a fine world and I wish I knew how to make »200 a year in it.

    - (Philip) Edward Thomas
      Letter to Gordon Bottomley,16 Jun.

  • O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible,we clutch thee!

    - Francis Thompson
      'In No Strange Land'.

  • Around me, around them [the dissidents], the total, all- eclipsing Soviet world, which renders any other world powerless and far away, had become profoundly, morally hostile.

    - Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron
      Among the Russians (published in the US asWhere the Nights are Longest).

  • My WorldAnd WelcomeTo It.

    -James Grover Thurber
      Title of book.

  • From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilizationworks its miracles and civilized man isturned almost into a savage.

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
      Of Manchester. Journal entry, 2 Jul. Journeys to England and Ireland (translatedby George Lawrence andJPMayer,1958).

  • A Stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; StrangeTreasures lodg'd in this fair world appear, Strange all, and New to me, But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That Strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

    -Thomas Traherne
    The Salutation (published1903).

  • You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.

    -Thomas Traherne
    Centuries of Meditations,'First Century', section 29 (published 1908).

  • Village cricket spread fast through the land.In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watcheach ball a potential crisis.

    - George Macaulay Trevelyan
    Quoted in Helen Exley Cricket Quotations (1992).

  • For themost of us, if we donot talkof ourselves, orat any rate of the individual circles of which we are the centres, we can talk of nothing. I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.

    - Anthony Trollope
    Framley Parsonage, ch.10.

  • If there is any game in the world that attracts the half- baked theorist more than cricket I have yet to hear of it.

    - Fred (Frederick Sewards) Trueman
      FreddieTrueman's Book of Cricket.

  • The President hears a hundred voices telling him that he is the greatest man in the world. He must listen carefully indeed to hear the one voice that tells him he is not.

    - Harry S Truman
      In ThisWeek, 5 Apr.

  •    To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain

  • I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinctnobody is that. Doubtless some people say theyare, but this world isgrievously given to lying.

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
      Notebook, ch.31, Feb^Mar.

  • Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for itrisk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
    c.1906  Quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine (ed) MarkTwain's Notebook (1935).

  • The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      Self-Consciousness, III.'GettingTheWords Out'.

  • In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      Self-Consciousness,VI.'On Being A Self Forever'.

  • Theyare all gone into the world of light, And I alone sit lingering here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.

    - Henry Vaughan
      Silex Scintillans,'TheyAreAll Gone'.

  • Labor omnia vicit improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas. Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard.

    -Virgil full name Publius Vergilius Maro
    Georgics,1.145^6 (translated by H Rushton Fairclough).

  • La superstition met le monde entier en flammes; la philosophie les e  teint. Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy puts out the fire.

    -Voltaire pseudonym of  Fran c° ois Marie Arouet
      Dictionnaire philosophique,'Superstition'.

  • The fate of poetry isto fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

    - Derek Alton Walcott
      In the NewYorkTimes, 8 Dec.

  • The hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world. 886

    -William Ross Wallace
    c.1865  John o' London'sTreasureTrove.

  • Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails.

    - Edmund Waller
      'Of EnglishVerse'.

  • The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
      Letter to Lady Ossory,11 Dec. InW S Lewis (ed) Selected Letters of HoraceWalpole (1973).

  • When will the world know that peace and propagation are the two most delightful things in it?

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
      Letter to Sir Horace Mann,7 Jul. In The Correspondence of HoraceWalpole (Yale edition,1937^8).

  • I have lived long enough in the world to know that the safety of a Minister lies in his having the approbation of this House.Former Ministers neglected that and thereforethey fell; I have always made it my first study to obtain it, and therefore I hope to stand.

    - Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Orford Walpole
      Speech, House of Commons, 21 Nov.

  • Although Marycannot be a model for the New Woman, a goddess is better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.

    - Marina Sarah Warner
      Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and Cult of theVirgin Mary, epilogue.

  • It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.

    - BookerTaliaferro Washington
      Farewell address to the union,17 Sep.

  • I think there is a world market for about five computers.

    -ThomasJohn Watson
      Quoted in Christopher Cerf andVictor Navasky The Experts Speak (1984).

  • In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be classics, now it's lyric verse.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      The Loved One, ch.9.

  • Most of the world's troubles seem to come from people who are too busy. If only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      Seven Deadly Sins.

  • The beauty of the world is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us†the beauty of the world isthe commonest, easiest and most natural way of approach.

    - Simone Weil
    Attente de Dieu (translated asWaiting for God,1951).

  •    Illustrious Cook,Columbus of our shore, To whom was left this unknown world t'explore, Its untraced bounds on faithful chart to mark, And leave a light where all before was dark.

    -William Charles Wentworth
      Australasia.

  • If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      Mind at the End of ItsTether, ch.1.

  • I look upon all the world as my parish.

    -John Wesley
      Journal entry,11 Jun.

  • Antifeminists, from Chesterton down to Dr Lionel Tayler, want women to specialise in virtue.While men are rolling round the world having murderous and otherwise sinful adventures of an enjoyable nature, in commerce, exploration or art, women are to stayat home earning the promotion of the human race to a better world.

    - Dame Rebecca formerly  Cecily Isabel Fairfield West
      'The Personal ServiceAssociation:Work for Idle Hands to Do', in The Clarion,13 Dec.

  • An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences.

    - Edith Newbold ne  e Jones Wharton
      TheAge of Innocence, bk.1, ch.1.

  • The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent and uncertain† But there can be no doubt as to the elements in the record that have evoked the best in human nature. The Mother, the Child and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self- forgetful, with his message of peace, love and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

    - Alfred North Whitehead
     Adventures of Ideas.

  • I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

    -Walt(er) Whitman
      Leaves of Grass,'Song of Myself', section 52.

  • Come lovelyand soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

    -Walt(er) Whitman
    ^66  Leaves of Grass,'Memories of President Lincoln','When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', section14.

  • We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear,'You are not true.'

    - Richard Wilbur
      Ceremony and Other Poems,'Epistemology'.

  •    There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
    The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch.1.

  • There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Cecil Graham. LadyWindermere's Fan, act 3.

  • A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Lord Illingworth. AWoman of No Importance, act 3.

  • Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.

    -Thornton Niven Wilder
      OurTown, act 2.

  • I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is a struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world standsmoment by moment on the razor-edge ofdangerand must be fought forwhether it's a field, or a home, or a country.

    -Thornton Niven Wilder
      The Skin of OurTeeth, act 3.

  • Ninety-ninepercent of the people inthe world are fools, and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

    -Thornton Niven Wilder
      The Matchmaker, act1.

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

    -TennesseeThomas Lanier Williams
      In the Observer,7 Apr.

  • I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.

    -William Carlos Williams
      Al Que Quiere!,'Tract'.

  • Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

    -William Carlos Williams
      Spring and All,'Spring and All'.

  • All are deceptions, substitutes for the hard job of using reason and industry and intuition and compassion to solve even a little bit of the muddle with humaneness and awe for the natural world and the complexity of human beings.

    - SirAngus FrankJohnstone Wilson
      Letter to David Farrer, his publisher, Jul. Quoted in Margaret Drabble AngusWilsonA Biography (1995).

  • The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted on the tested foundations of political liberty.

    - (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson
      Speech before a joint session of Congress, 2 Apr, to request a declaration that a state of war exists between Germany and the US.

  • In this war, we demand nothing that is peculiar to ourselves; only thatthe world be made fit and safeto live in.The programme oftheworld'speace, therefore, is our programme.

    - (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson
      The'Fourteen Points'speech to Congress, 8 Jan.

  • We are creating a Britain of which we can be proud, and the world knows it. The world's tourists are coming here in their millions†because the new Britain is exciting. Yes,Britain with a Labour Government is an exciting place.

    - (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
      Speech, Labour Party Conference, 30 Sep.

  • Now thank we all our God, With heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things hath done, In whom his world rejoices; Who from our mother's arms Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, And still is ours to-day.

    - Catherine Winkworth
      Lyra Germanica (translated from the original German of Martin Rinkart 'Nun danket alle Gott', c.1636).

  • The world is in flames today for a cause that interests Russia first and foremost; a cause that is essentially the cause of the Slavs, and which is of no concern to France or to England.

    - Sergei Yulevich Witte
      Said to the French Ambassador,10 Sep.

  • DieWelt ist alles, was der Fall ist. The world is all that is the case.

    - LudwigJosef Johann Wittgenstein
    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, prop.1 (translated by Pears and McGuinness).

  • DieWelt ist die Gesamtheit derTatsachen, nicht der Dinge. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

    - LudwigJosef Johann Wittgenstein
    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, prop.1.1 (translated by Pears and McGuinness).

  • 'Where they got you stationed now, Luke?'† 'At the p-p-p-present time in Norfolk at the Navy base,' Luke answered,'m-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy.'

    -Thomas Clayton Wolfe
      Look Homeward, Angel, pt.3, ch.36.

  • In this universe, Where the least things control the greatest, where The faintest breath that breathes can move a world.

    -William Wordsworth
    ^6  Oswald.The Borderers, act 3,1.1562^4 (published1842).

  • Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,both what they half create And what perceive.

    -William Wordsworth
      'Lines composed a few miles aboveTintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of theWye', l.102^6.

  •    In the very world, which is the world Of all of us,the place where, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all!

    -William Wordsworth
    ^1805  The Prelude, bk.11, l.142^4 (published1850).

  • With little here to do or see Of things that in the great world be, Sweet Daisy! oft I talk to thee For thou art worthy, Thou unassuming commonplace Of Nature, with that homely face, And yet with something of a grace Which love makes for thee!

    -William Wordsworth
      'To the Daisy', stanza1 (published1807).

  • The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathe'  d horn.

    -William Wordsworth
      'The world is too much with us; late and soon', complete poem (published1807).

  • What soul was his, when, from the naked top Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay Beneath him:Far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces he could read Unutterable love.

    -William Wordsworth
      'The Excursion', bk.1, l.198^205.

  • Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

    - Frank Lloyd Wright
      In Frederick Gutheim (ed) Frank LloydWright on Architecture: selected writings (1894^1940).

  • Rose of all Roses,Rose of all the World! The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled Above the tide of hours, trouble the air, And God's bell buoyed to be the water's care.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'The Rose of Battle', l.1^4. Collected in The Rose (1893).

  • I have made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'A Coat', complete poem. Collected in Responsibilities (1914).

  • If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, NoVanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'A WomanYoung and Old', part 2 'Before theWorld was Made', stanza1. Collected in TheWinding Stair and Other Poems (1933).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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