Quotes About Impact

Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.

An abundance of pessimists might bend reality to Armageddon just by expecting

A grace is a thing you get from God, you use it to make a better world, or not use it, you have to choose.

The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndrome no less filled with promise than the life of a philosopher, because the only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others, either by conscious acts of will or by unconscious example.

My wife, who is the linchpin of my life, claims that I have a presence much bigger than my physique. She says that people measure me by the impression I make on them. I find this notion ludicrous. It is bullshit born of love.

Moral responsibility is on the shoulders of those who take the technology out of the lab and use it to immoral ends.

a long fall from thirty or forty stories, a short span of seconds

no one here ever took the work of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud seriously. So there had been no Lenin, no Soviet Union, no communism or fascism; and two hundred million people who, elsewhere, had been killed by those regimes, had not been killed here.

she reacts to the impact not as if it might damage the vessel, but as if it is a thrill she'd happily pay for if this were a carnival ride.

By relocating from this world to the one where Jeffy and Amity yearned for her, she'd be taking an action that would spawn other parallel lives for herself, of which she, in this incarnation, had no knowledge. Other than her husband and daughter, whose lives would be affected by her action, how many others would live additional lives that branched from her action, and did it matter?

It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better

the basic problem with the average man and woman was precisely that they were so average and that there were so many of them, taking far more than they gave to the world, quite incapable of managing their own lives intelligently let alone society, government, the economy, and the environment

Watching television news of freeway wrecks, apartment-building fires, and heinous murders, one sat numb and unaffected. Music that had once stirred the heart, art that had once touched the soul, now had no effect. Some people overcame this loss of sensitivity in a year or two, others in five years or ten, but others – never. The

The why of a life could never be solved in this world, although vast libraries of solemn books speculated on the meaning and purpose of existence. Nothing could be known other than the what of any single life: what happened, what actions were taken, what events occurred beyond the person's control, what obvious consequences ensued, what impact for better or worse that one life was seen to have on others.

Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.

Your faith could have no substance if you did not also accept the reality of its effects in this world.

Ganesh held up one hand. "There's more, and it suggests that tens of thousands of people, focused on the same expectation, can unwittingly affect reality and make that expectation come to pass.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Once a weapon was drawn, it was more likely to be used, and not always as wisely as you might expect to use it.

The free kitchen, after-school programs, keeping porn out of libraries—all that needs done, but it's dealing with the aftermath, not with the causes. I'm in the mood to deal with a cause.

Loneliness is the fate of he who dares to change the world.

but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud.

Our actions are reactions, our choices based on the way we feel in the moment, with no consideration for their impact on our future.

Being kind is like looking at your own reflection in the calm waters of a lake. Then the act of kindness ripples those waters, like a stone tossed upon the surface.