worldview Quotes

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

“The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?”

“I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.”

“Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?... It is because people think only about their own business, and won’t trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

″Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.″

“In the world’s terms, though, all of us were tainted.”

“But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to “creation of the world,” the will to the causa prima.”

“George: I read somewhere that science fiction is really not science fiction at all…that you people are rearranging my genes so that everyone will be like everyone else.”

“On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.”

“The more you get set into your own world, the smaller your world becomes.”

“I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.”

“She did not like to hear really bad nor tragic things, but no one does, and having seen them I did not care to talk about them unless she wanted to know how the world was going. She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad.”

“Let’s play hopscotch in malls. Let’s drive fast with the top down. Let’s turn up the music as loud as it’ll go. Let’s put a couch on an island in the middle of the freeway and wave at everyone on their way to work. Let’s hug strangers in parking lots. Let’s hand out secret messages at traffic lights. Let’s make lists of all the things that make us smile and tick them off, one at a time. The world will carry on without you and me when we’re gone. Let it carry on without us, today.”

″[...] So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason too.”

“If you feel the world owes you something, brace yourself for a life of sour hours. You’ll never get reimbursed. The sky will never be blue enough...”

“That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.”

“A man must know how to look before he can hope to see.”

“The children have never seen the world outside their home. Not even through the windows. And Malorie hasn’t looked in more than four years. Four years.”

“We cannot merely pray to You, O God, To root out prejudice, For You have already given us eyes With which to see the good in all men If we would only use them rightly.”

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

“Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.”

“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.”

“And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”