Insignificance Quotes - Page 3

• Subtlety will sometimes give safety, no less than strength; and minuteness has sometimes escaped, where magnitude would have been crushed. The little animal that kills the boa is formidable chiefly from its insignificance, which is incompressible by the folds of its antagonist.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Animal, Safety, Giving

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• There are girls, not specially beautiful, whom you could not lose in a crowd. There are other girls, apparently perfect in beauty, who seem to melt into insignificance.

  Mack Sennett

  Beautiful, Girl, Perfect

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• Our concerns sink into insignificance when compared with the eternal value of human personality - a potential child of God which is destined to triumph over lie, pain, and death. No one can take this sublime meaning of life away from us, and this is the one thing that matters.

  Igor Sikorsky

  Children, Pain, Lying

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• If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

  Douglas Coupland

  Jobs, Children, Night

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• Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.

  Thomas Hardy

  Men, Spirit, Oblivion

  1874 Far from the Madding Crowd, ch.22.

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• How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "On the Heights of Despair". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1934.

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• Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.

  Charles Yu

  Lying, Mirrors, Doors

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• ...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

  Milan Kundera

  Tragedy, Mazes, Shells

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• Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.

  Erich Fromm

  Tyrants, Political, Feelings

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Escape from Freedom”, p.135, Open Road Media

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• Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.

  Thomas Szasz

  Men, Liberty, Libertarian

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.109, Routledge

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• Questions of personal priority, however interesting they may be to the persons concerned, sink into insignificance in the prospect of any gain of deeper insight into the secrets of nature.

  Lord Kelvin

  Nature, Science, Interesting

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• People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Religious, Rights, People

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• There is no such thing as an insignificant life, only the insignificance of mind that refuses to grasp the implications.

  Laurence Overmire

  Life, Mind, Refuse

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• One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.

  Joseph Conrad

  Believe, Ocean, Floating

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.145, Cambridge University Press

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• A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Cousin, Uncles, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.350, Library of America

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• There's only one way for an individual to remain upright, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-oblivionorself-contempt. That's calmly to turn away from everything, to say, "Enough!" and, folding one's useless arms across one's empty breast, to retain the ultimate, the sole attainable virtue, the virtue of recognizing one's own insignificance.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Fall, Self, Pieces

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• It needs more skill than I can tell
  To play the second fiddle well.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Play, Skills, Needs

  Spurgeon, Charles H. (2015). “The Salt Cellars”, p.300, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.

  Thomas Huxley

  Real, Oedipus, Views

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• When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live.

  Angelina Grimke

  Sex, Responsibility, Men

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• She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

  Ian Mcewan

  Real, Bridges, Waiting

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• Ivy [Wilkes] does exhibit a certain impatience at the beginning of the book [The Dissemblers]. She doesn't want to wait through years of hard work and insignificance to make her mark on the art world. Part of her growth is in realizing - even embracing - that the process of art is more important than the product or the recognition.

  Liza Campbell

  Art, Book, Hard Work

  Source: newwest.net

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• There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
  Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
  From insignificance.

  W. H. Auden

  Responsibility, Verbs, Machines

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• If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

  Stanley Kubrick

  Writing, Men, Symphony

  Interview with Eric Nordern, Playboy, September 1968.

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• Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.

  Bernard Beckett

  Fear, People, Monsters

  "Genesis". Book by Bernard Beckett, www.npr.org. 2010.

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• I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.

  Henri Barbusse

  Believe, Solitude, Doe

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