Quotes About Insignificance

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

A time will come when you're going to be numerous but your impact in the world will be like nothing

It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

When you've been talked about as much as I have, you'll realize how little it matters.

The death of a fly is still death. It's death marching toward a certain end of the world, which widens the field of the final sleep. When you see a dog die, or a horse die, you say something, like poor thing … But when a fly dies, nothing is said, no one records it, nothing.

One day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter.

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you... ... ...and that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

We are not grand because we are at the top of the food chain or because we can alter our environment - the environment will outlast us with its unfathomable forces and unyielding powers. But rather than be bound and defeated by our insignificance, we are bold because we exercise our will anyway, despite the ephemeral and delicate presence we have in this desert, on this planet, in this universe.

It was the first time the features and formative processes of the desert had made me pause and absorb just how small and brave we are, we the human race.

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.

They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When

They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important.

Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.

He had lost his race. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had feared, but by millennia. The huge and silent shadows driving across the stars, more miles above his head than he dared to guess, were as far beyond his little Columbus as it surpassed the log canoes of paleolithic man. [...] All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone.

What the deuce is it to me? he interrupted impatiently: you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.

The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

It is that the chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

To a great mind, nothing is little," remarked Holmes, sententiously.

They say words more empty than the wind, she said. 'Tis nothing, love. Nothing, and less than nothing. The wind is nothing yet powerful, he said.

At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.

Elles [Rosa Luxembourg, Marie Curie] démontrent avec éclat que ce n'est pas l'infériorité des femmes qui a déterminé leur insignifiance historique: c'est leur insignifiance historique qui les a vouées à l'infériorité.

it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority