Quotes About Significance

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal

I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]

The . . . argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that the man who studied a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance

No challenge, no matter how insignificant, can be left unanswered. Even a cry in the wilderness must be acknowledged, because someone might have heard it.

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

Everything in his life now seemed to signal: too late.

Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.

You're such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You're a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.

I can't quite believe he has actually left this scene, left our lives, wherein he was always so significant!

I can decide what to say but not what the words mean which I have said. I can decide what to do but I am not master of the significance of my act.

I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been.

My first love, and also my only love. All the best, even Clement, have been shadows by comparison. The necessity of this seems, in my own case, so great that I find it hard to imagine that it is not so with everyone.

But emotion had come upon him after all. Not for fifty billion people. What in Time did he care for fifty billion people? There was just one. One person.

What kind of a ridiculous animal are we to be lords of the world after the dinosaurs had failed? Sure, we're intelligent, but what's intelligence? We think it is important because we have it. If the Tyrannosaurus could have picked out the one quality that he thought would ensure species domination, it would be size and strength. And he would make a better case for it. He lasted longer than we're likely to.

Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

Barrabás llegó a la familia por vía marítima, anotó la niña Clara con su delicada caligrafía. Ya entonces tenía el hábito de escribir las cosas importantes y más tarde, cuando se quedó muda, escribía también las trivialidades, sin sospechar que cincuenta años después, sus cuadernos me servirían para rescatar la memoria del pasado y para sobrevivir a mi propio espanto.

Las fechas son importantes y también los rituales, porque les dan significado y belleza a los actos humanos y ayudan a fijar los eventos en la memoria.

Para un chino ilustre el evento más importante en la vida era su propio funeral.

I've been to New Zealand before, many times. And of course it has a significance to me because I do have something that's very special in New Zealand. I have '10 Guitars,' which is a very popular song, and I understand it's like the second national anthem over there.

Performing my father's songs at the Led Zeppelin O2 reunion concert in 2007 was an honor that I will forever remember as one of the most bittersweet, yet greatest nights of my life.

Nothing is being done of any real significance. Our demand is the government must tell the truth about the crisis we're in. And that includes working with communities to build resilience... We want to go to net carbon zero emissions by 2015 and reduce our consumption levels.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.