Much Larger Than Quotes & Sayings

I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me.
Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me. — Walt Whitman

Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself. — Peter Lindbergh

We human beings are only part of something much larger. When we walk along we may crush a battle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might not have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by races over which we have no control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. — Arthur Golden

He went on loving her," she whispered, as much to herself as to anyone else. "He didn't forget her." "Of course he didna forget her." She opened her eyes to see Ian's long face and kind brown eyes six inches away. A broad work-worn hand rested on hers, warm and hard, a hand even larger than her own. "Neither did we," he said. — Diana Gabaldon

I think the idea of a heightened reality and then the fantasy that we're able to be swept up in, and then these larger than life heroes and the possibility of someone much more powerful than we are and greater that can come and save the day, so to speak, is inspiring. — Chris Hemsworth

I interviewed one of the most powerful lawyers in the world and he told me, "At the time, it was the worst thing in the world not to be able to get a job at a fancy law firm, but it's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life." It was a humble acknowledgment of how forces much larger than himself shaped his career. I really wanted to bring that point home. — Malcolm Gladwell

Conversely, younger people, in particular those born in the 1970s and 1980s, have already experienced (to a certain extent) the important role that inheritance will once again play in their lives and the lives of their relatives and friends. For this group, for example, whether or not a child receives gifts from parents can have a major impact in deciding who will own property and who will not, at what age, and how extensive that property will be - in any case, to a much greater extent than in the previous generation. Inheritance is playing a larger part in their lives, careers, and individual and family choices than it did with the baby boomers. — Thomas Piketty

If the possessor of a units of money receives h additional units, then it is not at all true to say that he will value the total stock a + h exactly as highly as he had previously valued the stock a alone. Because he now has disposal over a larger stock, he will now value each unit less than he did before; but how much less will depend upon a whole series of individual circumstances, upon subjective valuations that will be different for each individual. — Ludwig Von Mises

If you're filming a scene on horseback, if you're trying to control an animal that's much larger than you and trying to get it to do the exact same thing so you can match things up, that can get tricky, especially if the horse gets tired or angry or something. — Daniel Portman

The biggest surprise watching video on the tiny, 2.5-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) is completely immersive. Three unexpected factors are at work. First, the picture itself is sharp and vivid, with crisp action that never smears the screen is noticeably brighter than on previous iPods. Second, because the audio is piped directly into your ear sockets, it has much higher fidelity and presence than most peoples TV sets. Finally, remember that a 2.5-inch screen a foot from your face fills as much of your vision as a much larger screen thats across the room. — David Pogue

You are connected to something very much larger than yourself. And that's a beautiful thing. — Joan Osborne

I believe that, if managed well, the Fourth Industrial Revolution can bring a new cultural renaissance, which will make us feel part of something much larger than ourselves: a true global civilization. I believe the changes that will sweep through society can provide a more inclusive, sustainable and harmonious society. But it will not come easily. — Klaus Schwab

Every season, I take the opportunity to convey a much larger message than just hemlines and trends. — Kenneth Cole

Daily Christian living, in other words, is daily Christian dying: dying to our trivial comforts, soul-shrinking conveniences, arrogant preferences, and self-centered entitlements, and living for something much larger than what makes us comfortable and safe. — Tullian Tchividjian

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away. — Peter Sotos

The evangelical with his "minority complex" often forgets that he is part of a massive historical movement much larger than his own kind of church. Catholic and Protestant thought of various sorts, and Eastern Orthodoxy, can all be of help, for they share with him the basics of Biblical theism. The evangelical tends to see himself today standing alone, he supposes that nobody ever faced such issues as he now faces, and he therefore thinks in a vacuum. — Arthur F. Holmes

I'll let you in on a secret ... How to avoid taking a wrong turn. I speak from experience. Don't blame the world around you. The world is very much larger ... than you realize. Large enough to embrace all of you. — Yellow Tanabe

If we turn now to such vestiges of cult as are associated otherwise than with time and season, we discover a definite recognition of the survival of these nearly a century ago. Keightley, the old fairy mythologist, who did such yeoman service in the collection of much valuable elfin lore, says, as long ago as 1850, when referring to the confused nature of his subject: 'Indeed it could not well be otherwise, when we recollect that all these beings (the larger and greater fairies) once formed part of ancient and exploded systems of religion and that it is chiefly in the traditions of the peasantry that their memorial has been preserved. — Lewis Spence

Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization. — Bertrand Russell

A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now. — John Desmond Bernal

Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should. — Bertrand Russell

Everything shows up in Divine time. We get what we need on the schedule of a force much larger than ourselves. This invisible force moves the pieces around in its own way, in its own time, to harmonize with the perfect precision that defines every cubic inch of space and time. — Wayne W. Dyer

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century. — Noam Chomsky

We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them. — Arthur Golden

Great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into "something" much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us. — Richard Rohr

Taking all vegetable-eating nations together ... they are a larger and much better formed race than the flesh eaters. — Sylvester Graham

Women take a much larger risk, evolutionarily speaking, when they have sex. Sex is also a much larger investment for women than it is for men. For this reason, women have emotional circuitry designed to take this into account. For example, women tend to experience much more anxiety just prior to sex with a new lover. — Mystery

It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose,
it has something of the cabbage rose's voluminous quality; and when it finally drops from the vase, it
sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap, much as a rose will suddenly fall,
making us look up from our book or conversation, to notice for one moment the death of what had
still appeared to be a living beauty. — Vita Sackville-West

I believe that we are given strength and help from a power much larger than ourselves. I believe if I humble myself that this power will come through me, and help me create work that is bigger than I would have ever been able to have done alone. — Rebecca Wells

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted! Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into — Lewis Carroll

Science is often described as an iterative and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece, with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels of a much larger picture. But the arrival of a truly powerful new theory in science often feels far from iterative. Rather than explain one observation or phenomenon in a single, pixelated step, an entire field of observations suddenly seems to crystallize into a perfect whole. The effect is almost like watching a puzzle solve itself. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

This is better than a romance novel." P.J. said with a wistful sigh.
"You read that stuff?" Cole demanded.
"Why the hell do you ask the question like that?" P.J. said, annoyance evident in her tone and expression.
"You just didn't seem the type," Cole mumbled.
She flipped him the bird, and Shea had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. P.J. was easily half Cole's size but she also looked like she had the confidence to take on the much larger man. She might even kick his ass. The idea intrigued Shea greatly.
"I'm tempted to shove one of my romance novels up your ass." P.J. said sharply. "But I love my books too much to desecrate them like that, I'll settle for my boot."
Cole held up his hands in surrender. "I won't say another word. Romance novels are great. I love romance novels. I think everyone should read them. — Maya Banks

Some days I didn't eat. I confused the gnawing in my belly for hunger and fed it, but it only made me sick. Strange how much missing someone feels like hunger. How the hole they leave behind is so much larger than they were. How it grows even bigger, feeding on you. — Leah Raeder

After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a hard day's work with less food than did their ancestors 500 years ago. Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud. The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want. Capitalism — Yuval Noah Harari

The older, thinner, and less productive grass lands, however, frequently can be made to produce much larger yields of feed in corn than if left, as they are, in unproductive grass. — David F. Houston

In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sun-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something "God-given" about the situation. One bourgeois economist, in a book on development, accepted that the comparative statistics of the world today show a gap that is much larger than it was before. By his own admission, the gap between the developed and underdeveloped countries has increased by at least 15 to 20 times over the last 150 years. However, the bourgeois economist in question does not give a historical explanation, nor does he consider that there is a relationship of exploitation which allowed capitalist parasites to grow fat and impoverished the dependencies. Instead he puts forward a biblical explanation! Pg. 21 — Walter Rodney

The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behaviour of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualized behaviour patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largerly responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. — Carl Sagan

If you want to experience joy in your life, you have to be able to step outside yourself and become part of a cause that is much larger than you; one that brings a greater good to a greater community. — Srikumar Rao

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don't, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much. The kind of government services then supplied in return, which among other things safeguard production itself, more than compensate for this. But the larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. — Henry Hazlitt

If you think in terms of major losses, because losses loom much larger than gains - that's a very well-established finding - you tend to be very risk-averse. When you think in terms of wealth, you tend to be much less risk-averse. — Daniel Kahneman

I knew I didn't have much of a chance of getting away from that swarm of fae piranha, but it was an infinitely larger chance than I would have if I stayed in the car and burned to death. Hell's bells, what I wouldn't give to have my shield bracelet. Or my old staff. I didn't even have an umbrella. — Jim Butcher

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations. — Bill Bryson

To expect this larger-than-life, holier-than-thou sort of existence from us is not possible. We as much want to make our own mistake as a man does. — Kangana Ranaut

Was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included — Bill Bryson

The fixed- and growth-mindset groups started with the same ability, but as time went on the growth-mindset groups clearly outperformed the fixed-mindset ones. And this difference became ever larger the longer the groups worked. Once again, those with the growth mindset profited from their mistakes and feedback far more than the fixed-mindset people. But what was even more interesting was how the groups functioned. The members of the growth-mindset groups were much more likely to state their honest opinions and openly express their disagreements as they communicated about their management decisions. Everyone was part of the learning process. For the fixed-mindset groups - with their concern about who was smart or dumb or their anxiety about disapproval for their ideas - that open, productive discussion did not happen. Instead, it was more like groupthink. — Carol S. Dweck

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?" and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don't know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments - which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. — Atul Gawande

A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice. — Oscar Wilde

These recent weeks have taught me that I am not in control of my own destiny, and that powers much larger than I are at war in this world. I can only be faithful to the tasks set before me. The rest is out of my hands. — L.B. Graham

The history of ancient Greece showed that, in a democracy, emotion dominates reason to a greater extent than in any other political system, thus giving freer rein to the passions which sweep a state into war and prevent it getting out - at any point short of the exhaustion and destruction of one or other of the opposing sides. Democracy is a system which puts a brake on preparation for war, aggressive or defensive, but it is not one that conduces to the limitation of warfare or the prospects of a good peace. No political system more easily becomes out of control when passions are aroused. These defects have been multiplied in modern democracies, since their great extension of size and their vast electorate produce a much larger volume of emotional pressure. — B.H. Liddell Hart

As long as we live, our self-absorption and our insecurity will walk together, holding hands and swinging them back and forth like two little girls on their way to a pretend playground they can never find. Human nature dictates that most often we will be as insecure as we are self-absorbed. The best possible way to keep from getting sucked into the superficial narcissistic mentality that money, possessions, and sensuality can satisfy and secure us is to deliberately give ourselves to something much greater ... [Christ] showed us that giving, rather than getting, is the means to receiving ... to find yourself, your true self, you must lose yourself in something larger. — Beth Moore

Nobody tells her to shut up. It would be pointless. Amy has a large heart and an even larger mouth. When it rains, Amy rescues worms off the sidewalk. When you get tired of having a secret, you tell Amy.
Understand: Amy isn't that much stupider than anyone else in the story. It's just that she thinks out loud. — Kelly Link

The clouds crossed the sky, country rains washed the gardens, moons shone on the lake and the hillsides, cicadas sang in the August grass, boys and girls fell in love. In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence. What else is left but that, in the end? All our lives we had wanted to belong to something larger than ourselves. We belonged consciously to nothing now except to the pattern of our lives and fates. To God, possibly. I am chary of using that much-misused word, but I say honestly that at least I was conscious of His power. Whatever the spirit might be I did not know, but I knew it was there. Life was a gift; I knew that now. And so, much more consciously, did she. — Hugh MacLennan

Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude. — Charles Sturt

We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we're a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine. She — Blake Crouch

People think that we're crazy because we do six nights a week. I would physically not be able to take it, especially when you see how much he put into every show ... He created this larger than life style and he pulled it off. — Rob Thomas

I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn't care, because none of them would ever own him - own any larger piece of him than I now did. — Ian Fleming

Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our own successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection should be. We need hope from a much deeper Source. We need a hope larger than ourselves.
Until we walk with personal issues of despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of that despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death. Remember, death is an imaginary loss of an imaginary self, that is going to pass anyway.
This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal. — Richard Rohr

In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive. — Robert Greene

American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does. — Robert Kuttner

How big is a man's life?" asked Ultan.
"I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?"
"You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. I suppose that is why the depraved creatures who devour the bodies of the dead seek more. — Gene Wolfe

All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages. — Tim Lebbon

I remember the first check I got from The Who's recording [of "Young Man Blues"]. I'd been getting checks for $10 and $15 and so forth, and this one was for a much larger amount than that. I thought it was a mistake. — Mose Allison

A present," he said, then winced. The presents he'd bought for Portia usually included ropes of pearls or gemstones the size of robin's eggs. A man of his wealth ought to provide something much nicer than a sack of strange-looking pods. Sophie peeked inside the bag, her face screwing up in confusion. "What are they?" she asked, lifting the odd vegetable from the bag. It was a ruddy orange shade, larger than her hand, and looked like an oblong pumpkin. There were four of them in the bag. "You once said the cocoa powder in this village was bad, and you wanted to make your own. These are cocoa pods, shipped directly from Brazil. If you split it open, you will find fresh cocoa beans inside. Then you can begin your culinary adventure of making chocolate from scratch." "You remembered!" she exclaimed. Her eyes widened in delight as she held the pod to her nose for a sniff and then ran her fingers along its waxy skin. "It's fabulous. Thank you! — Elizabeth Camden

Like Honeycrisp, SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it, the cells shatter rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound. — John Seabrook

A job should not define who or what you are. You should be able to leave today and it not change the overall purpose or direction of your life. Your calling is a much larger concept than what you do daily to create income. Work opportunities can come and go - the direction of your life should remain constant. — Dan Miller

Atheism certainly promotes a low view of humanity- how much lower can you get than thinking yourself an accidental by-product of a series of even larger accidents! — John Dickson

Businesses are not just local or even national anymore - good ideas are immediately global. So the market opportunities are much larger than we've ever imagined or seen. — Alfred Lin

Where are the people today who will respond to the call of Christ? Have we become so accustomed to "cheap grace" that we instinctively shy away from more demanding calls to obedience? "Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross."4 Why has the giving of money, for example, been unquestionably recognized as an element in Christian devotion and fasting so disputed? Certainly we have as much, if not more, evidence from the Bible for fasting as we have for giving. Perhaps in our affluent society fasting involves a far larger sacrifice than the giving of money. — Richard J. Foster

Coffee in Brazil is always made fresh and, except at breakfast time, drunk jet black from demitasses first filled almost to the brim with the characteristic moist, soft coffee sugar of the country, which melts five times as fast as our hard granulated. For breakfast larger cups are used, and they're more than half filled with cream. This cafe con leite doesn't re-quire so much sugar as cafe preto-black coffee. — Bob Brown

All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers. — Robert Darnton

Am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. - Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road — Anonymous

good life, the happy life, is connecting to something larger than ourselves, recognizing that we are not mere blips on the cosmic radar screen but part of something much bigger. For some, a Victorian building, with its creaking staircases and tarnished molding, provides this connection. For others, it's giving a new cellphone, gift wrapped, to Uncle Wen who died twenty years ago but is still part of the family. — Eric Weiner

Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong. — Eugene Jarecki

In the past 20 years alone, it adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars adn government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves? I believe that if you read this book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts and the ethical arguments, you will agree that we must act. — Peter Singer

Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West's Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist. — Arthur C. Clarke

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One trick I've learned is to force myself to make a list of what's actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it's really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong. — Anonymous

You know, we live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost, even though the costs almost inevitably end up being orders of magnitude larger than anybody projected at the outcome. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist people who are suffering, then suddenly we come very, you know, cost-conscious. — Andrew Bacevich

Only the Indians respect the forest," Paolo said. "The white people cut it all down." Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover - an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless — David Grann

Media work needs ideals. Maybe thirty years from now, after I retire, I'll see the media mature and make the transition from political party, interest group, and corporate to truly public. But over the next ten years, the encroachment of commercialism and worldliness will loom much larger than the democratization we imagine. -Jin Yongquan in China Ink — Judy Polumbaum

It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons. — George Eliot

The vampire underworld is much larger than most people could imagine. It exists in all the cities mentioned in the book, but also in many, many more. Teenagers, especially, seem to like to act out vampire fantasies. — James Patterson

I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth. — James E. Lovelock

The area of the brain devoted to the reading finger of expert Braille readers was much larger than that of the nonreading finger, or of either index finger in nonreaders, Pascual-Leone found. It was a clear case of sensory input increase, with the person paying close attention, leading to an expansion of the brain region devoted to processing that input. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become. — Louis L'Amour

I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93) — Stephen Levine

In itself that music festival was nothing special, these music festivals in our country are all alike, performing a most useful function especially for all those people who are chained to their labors, year in and year out, so naturally everybody comes flocking to the two or three music festivals per year, with their actual and their so-called amusements and distractions, these affairs are called music festivals because unlike the usual so-called country fairs they feature a band, an enormous attraction to the populace, that's all it is, but the organizers know that they can draw a much larger crowd by calling it a music festival rather than a country fair, so it has become the custom to call these events music festivals even if they are nothing more than country fairs, everybody attends these music festivals which usually begin early on Saturday night and end late on Sunday morning. — Thomas Bernhard

The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."
So?"
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid. — Margaret Atwood

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader. — Flannery O'Connor

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way. — Jodi Picoult

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud ... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood. — Louise Erdrich

I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself. — Hugh Walpole

The secret of success is to realize that the crisis on our planet is much larger than just deciding what to do with your own life. — Marianne Williamson

So it seems as though this part of us that is living a life on Earth is only a small piece or splinter of a much larger us. That we are many rather than one, or rather pieces of a more complex whole. We are only able to focus on the splinter we perceive as our totality. That is a good thing, because if we were aware of the complexity of it we would not be able to function in this world or reality. We are only able to see the facade that masks a much larger picture. Only now are we being allowed to peek behind the veil. — Dolores Cannon

If a minstrel must embroider the truth to help us recall it fully, then let her, and let no one say she has lied. Truth is often much larger than facts. — Robin Hobb

A much larger value is consumed in lettuces than in pineapples,throughout Europe at large; and the superb shawls of Cachemere are, in France, a very poor object in trade, in comparison with the plain cotton goods of Rouen. — Jean-Baptiste Say

Already, the brain consumed more than a quarter of the body's blood supply ... an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more - perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them. Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he [Stone] sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he would see nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table ... Just brains, sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.
Idiotic. — Michael Crichton

The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys. — Benjamin Tucker