Quotes About World

The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction—a lurid but natural reaction—to the violence of the Islamic world.

It is in the world of things and places, times and troubles and turbid processes, that mathematics is not so much applied as illustrated.

There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understanding against.

This is what I discovered during my imprisonment. I saw the human character in its naked form. I saw at one end a narrow rank of villainy, and at the other a narrow rank of virtue. In the middle was everyone else. And I understood that the state of the world is the result of the struggle between these two extremes.

The notion of a thing is thus seen to be an abstraction, in which it is conceptually separated from its infinite background and substructure. Actually, however, a thing does not and could not exist apart from the context from which it has thus been conceptually abstracted. And therefore the world is not made by putting together the various "things" in it, but, rather, these things are only approximately what we find on analysis in certain contexts and under suitable conditions. To

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

This is a mad planet, David Bowie said in 1971. It's doomed to madness.

Men can be brilliant and strong, they whispered to one another. But men can be mad, as well. And the mad ones can ruin the world.

She had called in the debt that parents owe a child for bringing her, unasked, into a strange world.

Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.

Give up," they preached. "Don't bother trying to figure out how the flawed world works. Perfect knowledge is to be found only within the mind, the soul. Seek your own private salvation then, apart from the world, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to piece together the nuts and bolts of God's handiwork.

I suppose, all told, I've done more good than evil in my life, but that's incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world.

That is what cognitive distortions are: a highly misleading way of thinking about yourself and the world.

Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose

Zakath's face grew thoughtful. You know something, Garion? he said. Man thinks he owns the world, but we share it with all sorts of creatures who are indifferent to our overlordship. They have their own societies, and I supposed even their own cultures. They don't even pay attention to us, do you? Only when we inconvenience them...It teaches us humility, Garion agreed.

The whole world is beautiful, Belgarion' Eriond assured him in response to that unspoken thought. 'You just have to know how to look at it

Equally important to Yale's own success has been its extensive network of professional friendships throughout the world of investing. Among the very bright and well-connected, how they spend their time is always a matter of free choice because everyone has lots of alternatives about how they share insights and information—and with whom.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.

Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up of mostly objects.

Re which, again, please keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses-places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you is the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.

Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism.

We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world. — David Foster Wallace, interview in Whiskey Island , Spring, 1993.