Grand Insignificance Quotes

The idea being that if I was so incredibly small, then I could do almost anything, because what impact would I have, really? What damage could be done, being so puny in the big scheme? ~ Rosecrans Baldwin

All great tasks test our motivation. It's easy to court ideas over beers and change the world with napkin sketches, but like most things taken home from bars, new challenges arise the next day. It's in the morning light when work begins, and grand ideas (or barroom conquests) lose their luster. To do interesting things requires work and it's no surprise we abandon demanding passions for simpler, easier, more predictable things. ~ Scott Berkun

No woman can fully understand nor appreciate her femininity without the help of a man, even if he only exists in her imagination. ~ Lebo Grand

Almost every woman inherently wants to have the 'desirability advantage,' but few are willing to admit not to mention work on it. The following advice is strictly meant for sensual ladies: Don't be afraid to be your most gorgeous self or to look sexy. Yes, it will give you an unfair advantage, but what's really important is that it will teach you the art of living a sensual lifestyle, an art without which life (and love) would be utterly boring if not depressing. ~ Lebo Grand

Obamacare is a seriously flawed law that makes health care coverage less affordable, costs taxpayers more than advertised and fails to deliver on most of its other grand promises. ~ Fred Upton

The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility. It's remarkable to me how a sudden threat to the status quo (an affair, an infatuation, a prolonged absence, or even a really good fight) can suddenly ignite desire. There's nothing like the fear of loss to make those old shoes look new again. ~ Esther Perel

She thought for a moment, then said, When we are young, we think life will be like a su po: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths
bits and pieces, odds and ends
people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps. There is harmony in this, too, and beauty. I suppose that is why I like the chogak po. ~ Alan Brennert

Bill Clinton was doing Ku Klux Klan grand kleagel jokes at Byrd's funeral, saying, Oh, Robert C. Byrd, he used the - he was the grand kleagel. He just did what he had to do. ~ Sean Hannity

It will take an unprecedented act of courage, on a grand scale. You may have to do something virtually unknown in the annals of human history ... You may have to give up some of your most sacred beliefs ... let me make something clear. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I've never looked ahead very much in my life. I've never had any grand plan from the outset. I had no burning ambition to do what I do. ~ Tracey Ullman

[A] pile driver was improvised by mounting a large steam donkey engine, a steam hammer, and a timber tower on a barge. ~ Ray Bottenberg

The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: 'Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.' This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of "Thou Shalt Nots" is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing. ~ Herman Wouk

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to! ~ Lev Grossman

A truly sensual woman almost never gets heartbroken. Why? Because she doesn't attract heartbreakers in the first place, and not that the men she attracts are perfect, but I think the universe seems to value her a little bit too much. ~ Lebo Grand

With great power, comes greater responsibility. If your heart is not as grand, you shall be consumed by your own might and hurt your loved ones unintentionally when you give vent to your rage. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

You read card after card until you're talking so fast that it's hard to tell whether you're giving your rebuttal or suffering from a grand mal seizure. And you claim that every case you argue will lead to some kind of apocalypse or nuclear war or worse. Because ~ Katie A. Nelson

Words have power. Names are power. Never give that shit away for free. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

Rufus? He's a grand kisser, and he's dead sexy. ~ Catherine McCormack

Scottish operative lodges began in the seventeenth century to admit non-operative members as accepted or gentleman masons and that by the early eighteenth century in some lodges the accepted or gentleman masons had gained the ascendancy: those lodges became, in turn speculative lodges, whilst others continued their purely operative nature. The speculative lodges eventually combined to form the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1736. ~ John Hamill

In the New Testament, God's steadfast love and faithfulness are seen, not in an act of deliverance from foreign enemies, but in sending the Son and raising Him from the dead to enact a global rescue mission (Romans 8:3.) Jesus is God's supreme, grand, climactic act of faithfulness. Not only that, but "faithful" also describes Jesus. Paul writes, "We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but in faith in Jesus Christ" (Galations 2:16...). A better reading is "faithfulness of Jesus Christ" -- which is found in footnotes of many Bibles -- and the two readings couldn't be more different... Paul isn't saying, "You are not justified by your efforts but by your faith." The contrast he's making isn't between two options we have; the contrast is between your efforts and Jesus' faithfulness to you, shown in His obedient death on a Roman cross. Paul is interested in telling readers what Jesus did, Jesus' faithfulness, not what we do. God's grand act of faithfulness is giving His son for our sake. God is all in. Jesus' grand act of faithfulness is going through with it for our sake. Jesus is all in. Now it's our move, which really is the point of all this. Like God the Father and God the Son, we are also called to be faithful. On one level, we are faithful to God when we trust God, but faith (pistis) doesn't stop there. It extends, as we've seen, in faithfulness toward each other, in humility and self-sacrificial love. And here is the real kick in the pants: When we ~ Peter Enns

Betrayal is one of the most emotionally painful experiences a person can have, with its potent cocktail of fear, grief and anger; this triggers our primitive fight/flight response," says novelist and psychologist Voula Grand ~ Voula Grand

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest. ~ Pablo Picasso

To win Grand Slams you have to be in the right frame of mind, the right physical shape. ~ Jennifer Capriati

People say my ego is grand. I think it's in proportion to me. ~ Wilt Chamberlain

Alice, you might be the product of the biggest ball of ignorance, confidence, and good fortune the universe has ever manufactured. But if you're thinking that you can take your results at the virtual tables and your grand tactic of Ignorance Is Bliss, and make that work for the Main Event, forget it - it WON'T. ~ Elle Lothlorien

There is a price to pay when you don't love or respect yourself. Your kids pay, your health pays, your soul and spirit pays, your grand kids pay. Dysfunctional patterns get passed down, your pain gets passed down What you don't deal with your children and future generations will have to. ~ Tanesia Harris

I was visiting Marcus and his wife when a friend asked if she could talk to me alone. Teresa was the spouse of a Team member who'd served with Chris. We hadn't spent a lot of time together, but we'd always had a connection.
"I have something I want to give you," she said. "I don't know if it's going to seem corny to you or what, but I kind of want to do it for me."
She pressed a medal into my hand. I looked at it--it was the medal she'd received for completing the Boston Marathon.
"You and Chris kept me going," she explained. "It was almost eerie how, when my legs were tired and I wanted to quit, Randy Travis's song came on the iPod. It was the one he played at the memorial. My iPod was on random shuffle but it was always at just the right moment. I would hear that song and it would spur me on."
Maybe Chris was somehow behind that. People have told me of other inspirational incidents; each one, from simple to grand, has touched me with its beauty. ~ Taya Kyle

Don't be disheartened by the forces of evil. Nothing can happen that God hasn't allowed. Even resistance is all part of grand orchestration. The devil always has you right were God wants you. ~ Steve Maraboli

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights
the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights. ~ Frederick William Robertson

For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful. ~ Os Guinness

Without the continued existence of the democratic system and of publicly funded education and research, however, most current teachers and intellectuals would be unemployed or their income would fall to a small fraction of its present level. Instead of researching the syntax of Ebonics, the love life of mosquitoes, or the relationship between poverty and crime for $100 grand a year, they would research the science of potato growing or the technology of gas pump operation for $20 grand. ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe. ~ George Eliot

How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual. ~ Lauren Groff

The grand assertion is that you must see the world through probability and that probability is the only guide you need. ~ Dennis Lindley

N every culture, the sky and the religious impulse are intertwined. I lie back in an open field and the sky surrounds me. I'm overpowered by its scale. It's so vast and so far away that my own insignificance becomes palpable. But I don't feel rejected by the sky. I'm a part of it - tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. And when I concentrate in the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty out aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan

Oh, how small we were, in the grand scheme of it all.

Our planet was but a speck in the midst of the milky way galaxy, which was a speck in the midst of the known universe. We were fighting to save it, and yet it could disappear without anyone in the nearest solar system even noticing.

Small, insignificant. Little more than ants before a giant. ~ Wildbow

So, I see we meet again." He offered a smile. Although he could clearly see from her rounded abdomen that she was expecting a baby, he couldn't keep from noticing once again that she was a lovely woman. "I have to say, we didn't officially meet," he continued, trying to put her at ease. "Unless of course you go by the title Frau Maple Syrup." "I'm Frau Werner. Annalisa Werner." "And I'm Carl Richards." He put his arm to his waist and bowed as if he were the grand duke and she a duchess. "I'm Gretchen." Annalisa's daughter let go of her oma and turned to him. "Ah, I was expecting something like Raindrop." He turned to the little girl and bowed to her. "But I like Gretchen much better. It's a lovely name for a princess. ~ Jody Hedlund

To survive there, you need the ambition of a Latin-American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony. ~ Billie Burke

The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the "investigation" phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like "vile treachery" in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world's largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well. ~ Graham Moore

The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was. ~ Ridley Scott

A woman who is in touch with her sensuality subliminally empowers her man to prosper, flourish and truly live a happy life. She does
not know it, but she is a huge catalyst to his fulfillment. But those who suppress their own sensuality whether consciously or unconsciously make it difficult for their men to find the motivation they need to succeed, and thus be fulfilled. ~ Lebo Grand

The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity.The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn't quite it. (....) It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything - of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that that untold millions of people felt the same way - and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves. ~ David Foster Wallace

The Oscar nominations are out, and they're so white a grand jury has decided not to indict them, ~ Larry Wilmore

We could sit here and get super-high and talk about the illusory nature of reality, drawing back the veil, and so on, but what I'm learning is this: that loving anything or anyone this much requires you to hold conflicting thoughts in your head and heart. I want to look at [my daughter's] dear, dear little face forever; [but] nothing lasts forever...I will die, her father will die, my little family that is the whole heart of me is the tiniest of tiny blips in the sweep of space and time. We are nothing. We are part of something so grand we cannot hope to apprehend it. We are all lost. We are all floating in space. We were never lost. We will go home. ~ Emily Flake