Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy
When you have to hide who you really are to the world, you create a shell around yourself over time. A painted on coating of lies. It becomes your shield… and your prison.
—Selena Kitt in Grace
However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.
—Robertson Davies
There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.
—Winston Churchill
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
—David Russell
Just remember who you are. The world will try to change you into someone else. Don't let them. That's the best advice anyone can give you.
—Cinda Williams Chima in The Warrior Heir
The true definition of science is this: the study of the beauty of the world.
—Simone Weil
Even very recently, the elders could say [to the youths]: "You know, I have been young and you never have been old." But today's young people can reply: "You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be."… This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.
—Margaret Mead
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.
—Barbara Kingsolver
It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
—James Hillman
Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.
—Lady Mary Worley Montagu
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence and back into bondage.
—Fraser Tyler
If all the rich men in the world divided up their money amongst themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go round.
—Christina Stead
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
—Charles Baudelaire
In this world, you must be a bit too kind to be kind enough.
—Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux