Quotes About Insignificance

Ce que je reproche aux journaux, c'est de nous faire faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles.

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 felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's - or the next fish's, or the next grass-blade's! - and not a whit less.

My favorite word is 'pumpkin.' You can't take it seriously. But you can't ignore it, either. It takes ahold of your head and that's it. You are a pumpkin. Or you are not. I am.

Small things amuse small minds.

True greatness is anonymous. Therefore the greatest man is nobody.

Earth's creatures weren't alone in the universe. I craned my head back to stare at the trailer ceiling and wonder about the cosmos beyond. We were but dots on a miserable speck of a rock tucked into an insignificant corner of the galaxy.

Vivirá sin enterarse de su insignificancia, y ésta es una variante, acaso la única posible de la felicidad.

Si Dios es la Totalidad, la Gran Coherencia, si Dios es sólo la energía que mantiene vivo el Universo, si es algo tan inconmensurablemente infinito, ¿qué puede importarle de mí, un átomo malamente encaramado a un insignificante piojo de su Reino?

si Dios es sólo la energía que mantiene vivo el Universo, si es algo tan inconmensurablemente infinito, ¿qué puede importarle de mí, un átomo malamente encaramado a un insignificante piojo de su Reino?

No es muy inteligente ni sensible y gozará despreocupadamente de la vida; vivirá sin enterarse de su insignificancia, y ésta es una variante, acaso la única posible, de la felicidad.

In the grand scheme of things, his existence was not important to anyone but himself

and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. ~Mother Teresa

I felt both puny and pretentious, trying to write in the grandeur of that natural world where everything was older than time and I was the briefest object in the landscape.

We're not aware of the "big picture," any more than a plankton whose universe was a liter of water would be aware of the world's topography and biosphere.

No matter how insignificant it may first appear, everything in life tells a story. As

This is what is truly worthy and mighty, and we shall enter through symbols that are weak and insignificant. They are weak compared to perfect glory.

You shouldn't have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.

I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We're a late-night piss in the toilet, that's all we are.

I didn't go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn't see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide, they pass right through.