Quotes About Insignificance

Why was man created on the last day? So that he can be told, when pride possesses him: God created the gnat before thee.

The nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance.

Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have!

I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

What mattered a single moon in such a universe?

I'd much rather be in the expanse of the wilderness because it feels like part of my world. It's a unique perspective. You're this tiny speck in a huge environment, and it's nice to be reminded of that.

My own idea is that these things are as piffle before the wind.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

I could put my thumb up to a window and completely hide the Earth. I thought, 'Everything I've ever known is behind my thumb.'

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

There were days when I didn't exist; he saw through me and walked around me. I was invisible. There were days when I liked not existing. I closed down, stopped thinking, stopped looking...There were days when I couldn't even feel pain. They were the best ones. I could see it happening. There was no ground under me, nothing to fall to. I was able to not care. I could float. I didn't exist

Your living or dying is just a piss in the ocean.

He is a guy without collective importance. He is just an individual.

If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.

Din punctul de vedere al tantarului, omul e nemuritor.

If I'm confused, or upset, or angry, if I can go out and look at the stars I'll almost always get back a sense of proportion. It's not that they make me feel insignificant; it's the very opposite; they make me feel that everything matters, be it ever so small, and that there's meaning to life even when it seems most meaningless.

When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.

When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.

and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it's done so well.

Que la terre est petite à qui la voit des cieux! Delille. How small is the earth to him who looks from heaven

Que la terre est petite à qui la voit des cieux! Delille.

Out by that ocean, you feel smaller, less important, somehow; it puts things into proportion