Quotes About Significance

I have seen in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.

There are times when a battle decides everything, and there are times when the most insignificant thing can decide the outcome of a battle

Why and how are words so important that they cannot be too often used.

Greatness be nothing unless it be lasting.

Greatness is nothing unless it be lasting

The story of the ugly duckling and its scornful brethren holds special significance for the Dalits. I wonder how many swans waste their lives thinking of themselves as ugly ducklings, trapped and punished by the inequities of our caste system.

E quando si vedono le cose future con tanta chiarezza, come già stessero succedendo, allora è segno che non devono succedere mai. Perchè son già successe, in un certo senso, nella nostra testa, e non è più consentito di provarle davvero.

When people talk of the indelibility of a strong memory, they speak of recalling exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger space shuttle exploded. But what a woman really remembers is her first period; now there's a memory seared into the brain with the blowtorch of high emotion.

We have lived! Our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.

What else could have happened? Car wouldn't start? House caught on fire? Escaped convict climbed through his bedroom window and tied him with duct tape? Poison eggnog? Or maybe I just didn't matter to him.

Yet it wasn't until she was dead—until the New York Times saw fit to give her an obituary—that Rick realized just how far her story had traveled, how powerful the simple act of storytelling could be. Maybe it didn't matter if he never wrote his book about O-Six; maybe, in a way, he already had.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

The hand of one person may express more than the face of another.

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.

It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man... to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

Even if you've never experienced the wonderful things in life, only after something has been contaminated and marred will it become a beautiful thing. Pain can be healed with gentle care, darkness can be removed with sunlight. Don't underestimate the small things. Everything is significant.

Long ago it took a Copernicus to tell a provincial world that this planet was not the center of the universe. Some selfish moderns need a Copernican reminder that they are not the center of the universe either!

In any case, if recognition arising from proximate circumstances based upon fleeting criteria constitutes the sole measure of our personal significance, recognition will be both mercurial and insufficient.

I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.

Death must exist for life to have meaning.

The journey to significance starts with the mere willingness to surrender the status quo and take the first step of faith into the adventure.

All of us long for success throughout our lives, but we should long to see greater significance later in life and not see it wasted on our younger years. Success, in and of itself, is a heavy burden to bear; to bear it without a firm foundation of maturity and strong character can lead to great personal destruction. I

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski," and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.