Quotes About Insignificance

Ce lui qui nage au milieu des flots ne se rend pas compte de l'immensité de la mer

Sick with the impossibility of it all, with the reality of how small a person is. How at any second you can get struck down by a bullet or a tree; how a person can look so very tiny against the world, how each of us is nothing more than a speck

We are all dust.

I used to dislike it, but now I like it more and more, feeling small. I like feeling like a little speck.

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

Little things are great to little men.

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God

A tiny fly can choke a big man.

The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that!" —EDGAR MITCHELL, APOLLO 14 ASTRONAUT, 1974

However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche.

In an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster), in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way), in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

There are people, who walk around every day, asserting that we are alone in this cosmos. They simply have no concept of large numbers, no concept of the size of the cosmos.

The cosmic perspective is humble.

Astrophysics teaches us that we're not the center of the world.

Every time you turn a bigger telescope to the night sky, we end up smaller than we had previously imagined…It is an ego-dismantling device

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Death is a guillotine blade hanging over our heads, reminding us every second of every day that this life we treasure so much is no more important to the universe than those of the two hundred thousand insects each of us kills with the front of our car every year.

I do see your point, but to me, I'm just a mouse compared to the President of the United States.

Someday... Someday. What? They'll sing your praises? They'll write your story? You don't have a story, little one. You're simply a footnote in mine.

There are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation.

It was a garbage heap, and it was Sinai.

Sire! do not break out into thunder over such a nonentity as myself. God's great thunderbolts are not for bombarding lettuces.

Up here, in the vastness of Alaska, the words sounded infinitesimal and small. A fist shaken at the gods.