Quotes About Impact

Nothing makes a person feel worse than knowing you've inspired pity. It's a knife in the chest. A scalpel across the neck.

She's gone, yes. She'll live on in the people who loved her.

How can we think we're so important the world reacts to our whims or decisions or mistakes?

Words didn't have any impact on Albert Haight. He saw them as obstacles to dodge or bounce from his head like a soccer ball. To the gut. To where it hurts. "Don't do this," she said

It's funny how the most traumatic events that happen to you are always there behind a sometimes-impenetrable memory.

I wonder now how much of her depression was chemical and how much was caused by me.

I was the asteroid that hovered just outside his orbit.

Knowing that something is true does not in and of itself ensure that this truth will make a significant difference in our lives. The

Information is a difference that makes a difference.

There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?

Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.

A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn't really that bad until someone tried to change it.

And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.

The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash.

Some of the worst things were caused by people who tried to change things.

What I didn't know then, and what troubled me for a long time that Day of the Slaves, was how I could be there, and look at the children, and not be crushed by it.

When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action.

Ogni volta che agiamo, pur con le migliori intenzioni, ogni volta che interferiamo con le cose del mondo, rischiamo di provocare un disastro che forse non dipende da noi, ma che non si verificherebbe senza il nostro intervento.

When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.

And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.

The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

and the stars, and even the galaxies of stars. And if we were to get wiped out in a cosmic explosion, like an asteroid impact or something, some other expression of our level of complexity would emerge, because that's what the universe does. And this is likely to be going on all over the universe. How am I doing so far?

we can shape behaviour more fluently than we can understand it.