The World Yearns Quotes

Keep creating: the world yearns to celebrate your next masterpiece. ~ Ken Poirot

The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward. ~ Alison MacLeod

I like to sit at home in mild terror as the world rages outside without me, hoping that no one is going to drop by and expect me to come up with a humorous anecdote or ask me to have an opinion on something. ~ Samantha Irby

Friends, this world is not your home, so don't make yourselves cozy in it. Don't indulge your ego at the expense of your soul. Live an exemplary life among the natives so that your actions will refute their prejudices. Then they'll be won over to God's side and be there to join in the celebration when he arrives. 13-17 ~ Anonymous

It's naive to think there is a woman in the world who isn't brought up to believe that they are waiting for their soul mate. You even see it in Disney. ~ Janet McTeer

Pro-choicers often say no one is "pro-abortion," but what is so virtuous about adding another child to the ones you're already overwhelmed by? Why do we make young women feel guilty for wanting to feel ready for motherhood before they have a baby? Isn't it a good thing that women think carefully about what it means to bring a child into this world - what, for example, it means to the children she already has? ~ Katha Pollitt

I love the Country Music Hall of Fame. I don't think it's just a hall of fame and it's not just a museum. It's a schoolhouse. It's a place where people from all across the world can come and learn about this great genre that we're making a living out of. ~ Josh Turner

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world....genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before....surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual....the artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized. The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Subordination of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does vi ~ John Dewey

I think it's going to set the world on fire," said Gates. "It didn't do anything. There are fifteen comments at the bottom of the piece on the Web, and all of them are Russian mail order brides. ~ Michael Lewis

Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there. ~ Simon Blackburn

People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level - and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be published in England - Sir Thomas Malory's retelling of the Arthurian legends as Le Morte D'Arthur. In 1492, Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas opened European eyes to the existence of the New World. New worlds, both geographical and spiritual, are the key to the Renaissance, the 'rebirth' of learning and culture, which reached its peak in Italy in the early sixteenth century and in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. ~ Ronald Carter

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me. ~ Margaret Mahy

The world is a mysterious place and the very limitation of our senses in exploring it means we are sometimes aware of there being something beyond our ken. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final and so dull
love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the flourescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist. ~ Michael Cunningham

Christian obligation cannot be made to accord with a law of expediency. The Christian's maxims are, Do right because you are bound to do right. Do right though the heavens fall. There is a world of difference between You had better and You are bound to. ~ Francis Landey Patton

Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.

Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable. ~ Alfred Korzybski

The world is not a mechanical place, sir, whatever you might think. Sprites and wizards do not exist, in this universe at least. But there are beautiful truths to the world positioned so closely to your face that you have failed to see them your entire life. If you wish it, I will show them to you."
"Heaven," Barnett said quickly. "Will I go there?"
"No."
"What is it then?" he whispered. "Just black?"
"Darker than that, sir. Two minutes and two seconds. ~ Exurb1a

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. ~ Cormac McCarthy

You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain. ~ Richard Dawkins

Because how dare we write our own stories, in our own voices?' CaZZ answers.

'True that,' Tanya says.

'Banning our books would be their way of erasing us, of making us - and the world we live in - invisible,' CaZZ says. ~ R. Zamora Linmark

There are always rebels and radicals, I suppose,' McCleethy allows. 'Those who live on the fringes of society. But what do they contribute to the society itself? They reap its rewards without experiencing its costs. No. I submit that loyal, hardworking citizens who push aside their own selfish desires for the good of the whole are the backbone of the world. What if we all decided to run off and live freely without thought or care for society's rules? Our civilization would crumble. There is a joy in duty and a security in knowing one's place ... It is the only way. ~ Libba Bray

SPIIIIIDERS!" The world ceased its turning. The owl went dumb. The Milky Way flickered on the verge of extinction. Ben hollered it again: "Spiders!" He started thrashing wildly amid the pine needles. "They're all over me! ~ Robert McCammon

There are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them but doesn't itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn't exist without the tree, but it doesn't in any way affect he tree. I think it's all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they're talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit . . . Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn't passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct . . . That's why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and place are propitious . . . what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose . . . Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction but impediment . . . When passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive . . . and if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, th ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Let us suppose that someone is writing a story. From the world of conventional signs he takes an azalea bush, plants it in a pleasant park. He takes a gold pocket watch from the world of conventional signs and places it under the azalea bush. He takes from the same rich source a handsome thief and a chastity belt, places the thief in the chastity belt and lays him tenderly under the azalea, not neglecting to wind the gold pocket watch so that its ticking will, at length, awaken the now-sleeping thief. From the Sarah Lawrence campus he borrows a pair of seniors, Jacqueline and Jemima, and sets them to walking in the vicinity of the azalea bush and the handsome, chaste thief. Jacqueline and Jemima have just failed the Graduate Record Examination and are cursing God in colorful Sarah Lawrence language. What happens next? Of course, I don't know. ~ Donald Barthelme

While holding positive thoughts and emotions is advantageous, positive thinking itself is not "Hallmark Card thinking." It's really an ongoing awareness that all truly is well with the world, with life, and with oneself. It's also a commitment not to mindlessly pass on fears but to bring positive energy, images, ideas, and feelings into the lives of others, to help them attune to the wellness at the heart of the world. ~ David Spangler

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action. ~ Wendell Phillips

Therefore, vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of com-passion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world. ~ Morarji Desai

Events of resistance have the power not only to escape control but also to create a new world. ~ Michael Hardt

Jesus Lord, kind Pelican, Cleanse my filth with Thy blood, One drop of which can save The whole world from all its sin ~ Thomas Aquinas

Unlike adults, Phil said, children had an innocence that was refreshing. However, the human world had started to pollute them - like they did with oceans. ~ Alana Ankh

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world. ~ Francis Bacon

America is just the country that how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. ~ Peter Kropotkin

Consolation All are not taken; there are left behind Living Beloveds, tender looks to bring And make the daylight still a happy thing, And tender voices, to make soft the wind: But if it were not so - if I could find No love in all the world for comforting, Nor any path but hollowly did ring Where "dust to dust" the love from life disjoined, And if, before those sepulchers unmoving I stood alone (as some forsaken lamb Goes bleating up the moors in weary dearth) Crying "Where are ye, O my loved and loving?" - I know a Voice would sound, "Daughter, I am. Can I suffice for Heaven and not for earth? ~ Dan Pollock

Where are you going?"
"Out. Like you."
He raised an eyebrow, but he didn't press for more information. "One should always make one's own mistakes, instead of the mistakes of others, amira."
"Out like me, then."
"Dressed like that?"
"And what's wrong with it?"
"It looks like you chose the pieces by throwing darts. And you are terrible at darts. Besides, it's much too short." He pointed vaguely toward my ankles and winked. "The whole world can see the top of your foot. You look like a hussy."
I grabbed my skirt and flashed him my knees. He pretended to swoon. "Don't worry. This is late Victorian, not early. More permissive. ~ Heidi Heilig

The key to changing the world is not simply being there, but an active, transforming engagement of a singularly robust and energetic kind. ~ Os Guinness