Quotes About Insignificance

I am in myself so little that what they do with me scarcely interests me.

Porque na vida há tantos tipos de perspectivas, as chamadas grandes perspectivas, que todos consideram fundamentais, e as que eu chamo microperspectivas, que serão insignificantes, admito-o, mas se tudo é relativo, se a natureza concede que existam águias e formigas, por que razão, digo eu, não se poderá viver como as formigas, de microperspectivas?

No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

But the petty thought is like a fungus: it crawls and cringes and wants to be nowhere—until the whole body is rotten and withered with little fungi.

Preserving everything is a form of negligence that causes a new kind of damage: the loss of what matters in a glut of the insignificant. To preserve everything is to lose everything.

I have never imagined being or wished to be chosen as something important in the world.

Of history, how little do we know by personal contact; we have lived a few years, seen a few men, witnessed some important events; but what are these in the whole sum of the world's past.

Anyone who thinks they're important is usually just a pompous moron who can't deal with his or her own pathetic insignificance and the fact that what they do is meaningless and inconsequential.

Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.

Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures.

Along its banks, for hundreds of miles, lived millions of people, and Sita was only one small girl among them, and no one had ever heard of her, no one knew her—except for the old man, the boy and the river.

Britannia's big enough to count, but remote enough not to matter.

Hiç de fena insanlar de?illerdi. Yaln?z bo?, bombo? mahluklard?. Yapt?klar? münasebetsizlikler hep buradan geliyordu.

I want you to understand: however big one is in the world, tomorrow morning if I fall dead or you fall dead, the world will go on just fine—maybe better—without us!

If this solar system, in which we are, evaporates tomorrow morning, no one will even notice it in this Cosmos. It is that small, just a speck. In this speck of a solar system, Planet Earth is a micro speck. In that micro speck, the city you live in is a super-micro speck. In that, you are a big man.

Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited.

Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised; and the rememberer and the remembered; and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree; no not anyone with himself; and the whole earth too is a point.

What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us – and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod on which you creep. Reflecting on all this, this nothing important other than active pursuit where your own nature leads and passive acceptance of what universal nature brings.

Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands. The people who praise us- how capricious they all are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place. The whole earth a point in space- and most of it uninhabited. How many people there will be to admire you, and who they are.

Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend…or not even a legend. Think of all the examples. And how trivial the things we want so passionately are.

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands. The people who praise us—how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place. The whole earth a point in space—and most of it uninhabited

I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.