Quotes & Sayings About The World Is Too Small

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [ ... ]
This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy.
They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways. — Anna Quindlen

Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live - and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home. The warmth of dark energies that drew me to The Mecca, that drew out Prince Jones, the warmth of our particular world, is beautiful, no matter how brief and breakable. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I see everything, everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, 'We also have suffered.' It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. — G.K. Chesterton

The world is now too small for anything but brotherhood. — A. Powell Davies

There is room in heaven for a vast multitude, yea, room enough for all mankind that are or ever shall be; Luke xiv. 22, "Lord it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room." It is not with the heavenly temple as it often is with houses of public worship in this world, that they fill up and become too small and scanty for those that would meet in them, so that there is not convenient room for all. There is room enough in our heavenly Father's house. This is partly what Christ intended in the words of the text, as is evident from the occasion of his speaking them. — Jonathan Edwards

Too small is our world to allow discrimination, bigotry and intolerance to thrive in any corner of it, let alone in the United States of America. — Eliot Engel

When you give of yourself something new comes in to being ... the world expands, a bit of goodness is brought forth and a small miracle occurs. You must never underestimate this miracle. Too many good people think they have to become Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer, or even Santa Claus, and perform great acts if they are to be givers. They don't see the simple openings of the heart that can be practiced anywhere with almost anyone. — Kent Nerburn

The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. — Christopher Lasch

By seeing life's experiences through to the end, on our small scale, we can finally say, as Jesus did on the cross, "It is finished." We, too, can then have "finished our preparations," having done the particular work God has given each of us to do. However, our tiny cup cannot be taken from us either. For this reason have we come unto the world. — Neal A. Maxwell

TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones, too. What he doesn't do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren't telling you. — Michael Lewis

'it's not that you are too small, my little chick,but rather that the world is too big. — Melanie Benjamin

Too many people in this world think small is the best they can do. Not you, Libby Strout. You weren't born for small! You don't know how to do small! Small is not in you! — Jennifer Niven

Persistence trumps talent.
What's the most powerful force in the universe? Compound interest. It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence which improves persistence even more. And on and on it goes.
Lack of persistence works the same way
only in the opposite direction.
Of course talent is important, but the world is lit erred with talented people who didn't persist, who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by.
That's why intrinsic motivation is so important. Doing things not the get an external reward like money or a promotion, but because you simple like doing it. The more intrinsic motivation you have , the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed. — Daniel H. Pink

I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too. — Salman Rushdie

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. — C.S. Lewis

The way I see it, nothing in life is a rehearsal. It's not preparation for anything else. There's no getting ready for it. There's no waiting for the real part to begin.Not ever. Not even for the smallest child. This is it. And if you wait too long to figure that out, to figure out that we are the ones making the world, we are the ones to whom all the problems - and all the possibilities for grace - now fall, then you lose everything. Your only shot at the world.
I get that this one small life is all we have for whatever it is that we are going to do. And I want in. — Laura McBride

I hope the legend of Chris Kyle continues to grow and touch more and more people. I hope, too, that the movie will give people a small understanding of the massive sacrifice these guys make in going to war. It's hard to comprehend the journey and hardship these servicemen and their families go through. There is tremendous patriotism behind it but beyond that there is a great sacrifice SEALs and all our military make. If this movie can offer a small window into that world, I'll be very happy. — Chris Kyle

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. — Samuel Johnson

We're not in Khlong Prem Prison yet. So let's assume we're winning.
But inwardly, Anderson wonders. There are too many variables in play, and it makes him nervous. He remembers a time in Missouri when the Grahamites rioted. There had been tension, some small speeches, and then it had simply erupted in field burning. No one had seen the violence coming. Not a single intelligence officer had anticipated the cauldron boiling beneath the surface.
Anderson had ended up perched atop a grain silo, choking on the smoke of HiGro fields going up in sheets of flame, firing steadily at rioters on the ground with a spring rifle he'd salvaged from a slow-moving security guard, and all the while he had wondered how everyone had missed the signs. They lost the facility because of that blindness. And now it is the same. A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits. — Paolo Bacigalupi

We have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe. — Carl Sagan

Tom Dancer's gift of a whitebark pine cone

You never know
What opportunity
Is going to travel to you,
Or through you.

Once a friend gave me
A small pine cone-
One of a few
He found in the scat

Of a grizzly
In Utah maybe,
Or Wyoming.
I took it home

And did what I supposed
He was sure I would do-
I ate it,
Thinking

How it had traveled
Through that rough
And holy body.
It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer
Without words.
My gratitude, Tom Dancer,
For this gift of the world
I adore so much
And want to belong to.
And thank you too, great bear — Mary Oliver

The wonderful thing about praying is that you leave a world of not being able to do something, and enter God's realm where everything is possible. He specializes in the impossible. Nothing is too great for His almighty power. Nothing is too small for His love. — Corrie Ten Boom

Iris is my opposite in all ways small. She loves reality TV, finds movies too long, and only reads when it's for an assignment. Her idea of fun involves a credit card and an open mall, and she has harbored a massive crush on Justin Bieber, despite all his WTFuckery, since her junior year of high school. Her continuing love of The Bieb is evident by the fact that her favorite nightshirt is a My World concert tee. And while the image of his face plastered over her boobs is more than creepy, I hate that she hides the shirt whenever Henry comes around. Or rather, I hate that Henry makes her feel like she should to hide it for fear he'll make fun of her. — Kristen Callihan

There's a song called 'The Lights of My Hometown' that goes back to me growing up a regular kid. I mean, I lived in a town that I loved, but was too small for the dreams I was dreaming. You leave thinking the world has a lot more to offer than your hometown, only to realize years down the road that no matter where you grow up, you will never be able to recreate the innocence and feeling of 'home' anywhere else in the world. No matter who you are, or where that little town is, that's something we all have in common. — Aaron Lines

I love you, Francesca," Gabriel told her solemnly. "I cannot express in words what you are to me."
She smiled up at him. "You do a fairly good job expressing yourself."
His eyebrow shot up. "Fairly good?"
"I think your ego is already far too large. I am not about to call you the greatest lover in the world."
His hand cupped her soft breast, his thumb stroking small caresses over her taut nipple. "But you would if it were not for fear of my ego? — Christine Feehan

Today, the world is so small and so interdependent that the concept of war has become anachronistic, an outmoded approach. As a rule, we always talk about reform and changes. Among the old traditions, there are many aspects that are either ill-suited to our present reality or are counterproductive due to their shortsightedness. These, we have consigned to the dustbin of history. War too should be relegated to the dustbin of history. — Dalai Lama

The world is big enough to satisfy everyones needs, but will always be too small to satisfy everyones greed — Mahatma Gandhi

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. — William Sloane Coffin Jr.

It's a big world," I said. "I like to fly because it reminds me how huge the planet is and how small we are by comparison. I like that idea - that we're inconsequential, so our troubles are inconsequential, too." A corner of his mouth lifted. "You could never be inconsequential, Merit." He glanced out his window, traced a knuckle across the glass. "But I take your point. Living in darkness reduces our visibility, seems to narrow the world. Up here, thirty thousand feet above the earth, you are reminded of its magnitude. — Chloe Neill

A part is always too limited to explain the whole. You might picture a worldview as trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. Invariably, something will stick out of the box. Its categories are too "small" to explain the world. — Nancy Pearcey

She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant. — Stephen King

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted. — Terry Pratchett

Newsflash she already has body image issues.
It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates.
Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel.
What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just ... It, it hides the flaws we think we have.
They make us look beautiful to ourselves.
That's what makes us look beautiful to others.
Used to be all she needed to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara.
And we spend our whole lives trying to feel that way again. — Richard Castle

This narrative lends itself too easily to centralized solutions and the mentality of maximizing (or minimizing) a number. It subordinates all the small, local things we need to do to create a more beautiful world to a single cause for which all else must be sacrificed. This is the mentality of war, in which an all-important end trumps any compunctions about the means and justifies any sacrifice. We — Charles Eisenstein

The author describes the critic within us as adults as the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies, who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited about how it could work or should, who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love, unless, that is, they have small children. — Jennifer Senior

Small Man can be a very funny or a very tiresome Tour Companion, depending on how this kind of thing grabs you. He gambles, he drinks too much and he always runs away. Since the Rules allow him to make Jokes, he will excuse his behaviour in a variety of comical ways. Physically he is stunted and not at all handsome, although he usually dresses flamboyantly. He tends to wear hats with feathers in. You will discover he is very vain. But, if you can avoid smacking him, you will come to tolerate if not love him. He will contrive, in some cowardly way, to play a major part in saving the world. — Diana Wynne Jones

One frequently hears that there are not enough places for people to go. But where do we not go? We are too many and tread too heavily. (Perhaps the world is to blame for being too small.) — David M. Carroll

We give up what we want to give up and keep what in some way we still want to keep. There are payoffs for holding on to small, weak patterns. We have an excuse not to shine. We don't have to take responsibility for the world when we're spending all our time in emotional pain. We're too busy. The truth that sets us free is an embrace of the divine within us. — Marianne Williamson

Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error. Unlike other creatures we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes. — Ronald Wright

If you and I got on an airplane, you're going to L.A., Los Angeles, and I'm going to Senegal, we get there about the same time. The world is just that small. So a world that is so tightly bound by science and technology and now Internet and the web page, that world is too small for bullies. It has no room in that world for arrogance. — Jesse Jackson

But the meaning of these events is not that you are being punished or that someone is to blame, it is that you are living in a world too small, and that you must open up to a larger vision. As the gospel of Thomas says, "If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you."
Look within and Stay Inspired.
Derek Rydall — Derek Rydall

The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.
But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.
It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny. — Jim Butcher

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion - political or otherwise - which suddenly seem to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time. — E.F. Schumacher

Step Away from the Mean Girls ...
... and say bye-bye to feeling bad about your looks.
Are you ready to stop colluding with a culture that makes so many of us feel physically inadequate? Say goodbye to your inner critic, and take this pledge to be kinder to yourself and others.
This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you're too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world. — Oprah Winfrey

Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then ... Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain ... It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time. — H.G.Wells

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a man desires a thing too much, he at once becomes ill at ease. A proud and avaricious man never rests, whereas he who is poor and humble of heart lives in a world of peace. An unmortified man is quickly tempted and overcome in small, trifling evils; his spirit is weak, in a measure carnal and inclined to sensual things; he can hardly abstain from earthly desires. Hence it makes him sad to forego them; he is quick to anger if reproved. Yet if he satisfies his desires, remorse of conscience overwhelms him because he followed his passions and they did not lead to the peace he sought. — Thomas A Kempis

The world is always changed by people who don't listen to conventional wisdom. I think we often set our goals too small and try to accomplish them too quickly. — Rick Warren

Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses - the whole world over his fence. — John Steinbeck

I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn't true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult. — Emily St. John Mandel

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up on all other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. — David Whyte

When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it. — Paul Auster

If you are really feeling happy, you are feeling happy even if the whole world contradicts you. If the whole world agrees that you are not happy, then too it doesn't matter. Your happiness is real. It cannot be canceled by anybody's opinion. But if your happiness is unreal, it can be canceled by anybody. Even a small child can cancel it. You will be constantly looking towards people. You will be smiling, trying to show that you are happy so that they can say, 'Yes. You are very happy. You look very happy.' — Rajneesh

If the ills of humanity were caused by culture, they could certainly be cured in no way other than by culture.4 But the ills we have in mind are native to the human heart, which always remains the same, and culture only brings them out. With all its wealth and power, it only shows that the human heart, in which God has put eternity [Eccles. 3:11], is so huge that all the world is too small to satisfy it. Human beings are in search of another and better redemption than culture can give them. They are looking for lasting happiness, an enduring eternal good. They are thirsting for a redemption that saves them physically as well as spiritually, for time but also for eternity. — Anonymous

The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small. — Mother Teresa

...I'd rather live knowing I made a mistake than wondering if I could have made a difference if I'd tried.
The way I see it, nothing in life is a rehersal. It's not preparation for anything else. There's no getting ready for it. There's no waiting for the real part to begin. Not ever. Not even for the smallest child. This is it. And if you wait too long to figure that out, to figure out that we are the ones making the world, we are the ones to whom all the problems- and all the possibilities for grace- now fall, then you lose everything. Your only shot at this world.
I get that this one small life is all we have for whatever it is we are going to do. And I want in. — Laura McBride

As your prospective of the world increases, not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules or atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large such as cloud formations, river deltas, cloud formations, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed — Karl Ove Knausgard

To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods. If these truths mean the world is less comforting than it might have been, it seems like a pretty small price to pay. — Mira Grant

For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that Communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's phobia about world Communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world's eyes. Today America has become the world's nightmare. When an uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable team can flaunt the historic and traditional codes of civilization by disregarding the honor and sovereignty of other countries large and small, by intervening in the internal affairs of other countries for reasons real and contrived, the rest of the world does fear for its own welfare and for the future of this country. — L. Fletcher Prouty

Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it. — Camille Paglia

There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars. — Kate Forsyth

Sports is about balls and about heart and you don't find too many champions in any sport in the world without heart or balls. He might have them, but against Nadal they shrink to a very small size and it's not once, it's every time. — Mats Wilander

My brothers were still catching sparrows when my cousin told me to give him the baby bird. I didn't want to, but I took the squirming bird out of my pocket anyway. I wanted another look at it. It was so small. I don't think it could fly yet. My cousin plucked the bird from my palm and went off with it. I should never have taken it out of my pocket. When he returned, the birds were all burnt to a crisp. Their bones were popping out of their skin. I couldn't even tell which of the birds was mine. I looked at their burnt feathers and blackened skin and burst into tears. I cried for him to give me back my bird, but it was too late. My yelling must have irritate him, because he grabbed the smallest one and shoved it in my face, and said, 'Here it is.' When I took that charred baby bird from him, I felt the world crash down on me. It was the first time I had ever held something that had died. I love you as much as the sorrow I felt. — Kyung-Sook Shin

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). — Edward Teller

The day of parochialism in sports is over. The world is too small for what people like to call 'the good old days.' Fans want the best, wherever they come from. — Mario Andretti

With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times
simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: "He is made from your meat and bone." It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible. — Jhumpa Lahiri

No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside. — Sam Lipsyte

If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real. — Richard Flanagan

What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely ... Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I have a plan," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"Let's get married," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"Let's conquer the world," he said.
"Yes," she said. No one in her family had ever been accused of dreaming small.
"Let's bring the beau monde to its knees."
"Yes."
"Let's make them beg for your creations."
"Yes," she said. "Yes, yes, yes."
"Is tomorrow too soon?" he said.
"No." she said. "We've a great deal to do, you and I, conquering the world. We must start at once. We've not a minute to lose."
"I love hearing you say that," he said.
He kissed her. It lasted a long time.
And they would last, she was sure, a lifetime. On that she'd wager anything. — Loretta Chase

The starting point of enlightenment, a goal that every person should strive for, is inner leadership. Leadership is far more than something businesspeople do at work. Leadership is all about personal responsibility, self-discovery, and creating value in the world by the people we become. Too many people spend their time blaming others for all that isn't working in their lives. We blame our spouses for our unhappy home lives; we blame our bosses for our distress at work; we blame strangers on the freeway for making us angry; we blame our parents for keeping us small. Blame, blame, blame, blame. But blaming others is nothing more than excusing yourself. Blaming others for the current quality of your life is a sad way to live. In doing so, all you're doing is playing the victim. — Robin S. Sharma

Every spring in the wet meadows and ditches I hear a little shrilling chorus which sounds for all the world like an endlessly reiterated "We're here, we're here, we're here." And so they are, as frogs, of course. Confident little fellows. I suspect that to some greater ear than ours, man's optimistic pronouncements about his role and destiny may make a similar little ringing sound that travels a small way out into the night. It is only its nearness that is offensive. From the heights of a mountain, or a marsh at evening, it blends, not too badly, with all the other sleepy voices that, in croaks or chirrups, are saying the same thing. — Loren Eiseley

All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm ... The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward. — Friedrich Engels

It is better to do the smallest thing in the world than to hold half an hour to be too small a thing. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense. — Robin Hobb

I have stopped sleeping inside. A house is too small, too confining. I want the whole world, and the stars too. — Sue Hubbell

The danger of leaving overwhelming wealth and power in the grasp of a small minority is a lesson that leaders such as ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have learned a little too late, as the demonstrations across the Arab world indicate. — Graydon Carter

Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here . . . we have to sin. . . . It is enough that by the riches of God's glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. So you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly - you too are a mighty sinner. — Mark A. Noll

All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible. — Malcolm Forbes

The dance world is too small in lots of ways - it's too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas. — Siobhan Davies

Helen Justineau is thinking about dead children. She can't narrow it down, or doesn't want to. She thinks about all the children in the world who ever died without growing up. There must have been billions of them. Hecatombs of children, apocalypses, genocides of them. In every war, every famine, thrown to the wall. Too small to protect themselves, too innocent to get out of the way. Killed by madmen, perverts, judges, soldiers, random passers-by, friends and neighbours, their own parents. By stupid chance or ruthless edict. Every — M.R. Carey

I can smell the ocean in the distance. The salt wraps around my body, making my skin feel tight, and already I want to shower. I can do big cities, and small cities, and the even the occasional mountaintop is cool. But oceans are ridiculous. They take up way too much space in this overcrowded world and are filled with creatures that have several sets of teeth, like one row of man-eating teeth isn't enough. And just to add insult to injury, all that water isn't even drinkable. If you ask me, the ocean is kind of a prick. — Victoria Scott

I find that many men and women are troubled by the thought that they are too small and inconsequential in the scheme of things. But that is not our real trouble
we are actually too big and too complex, for God made us in His image and we are too big to be satisfied with what the world offers us!
... Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

I start from the supposition that the world is topsyturvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don't have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down. — Howard Zinn

It would be a grand thing for any community, large or small, to set aside even five minutes of the day for serious contemplation. If nothing more were to result than the recognition of such a feeling as "community" it would be a great step forward. If it be true that we have not yet accepted the fact that we are members of "one world," or even of one nation, how much more true it is that we are not even members of the little communities to which we belong. We become more and more atomized, more and more separate and isolate. We hand our problems over to our respective governments, absolving ourselves of duty, conscience, and initiative. We do not believe in personal example, though we profess to worship that great exemplar Jesus the Christ. We hide from the face of reality: it is too terrible, we think. Yet it is we, only we, who have created this hideous world. And it is we who will change it - by changing our own inner vision. — Henry Miller

We live in a small world. Not a leaf falls that doesn't affect a myriad of things. When we reach out to someone in love and the effect is made - everyone, everything which comes in contact
with the person we've effected is better for it. Of course, the converse is true, too. — Leo Buscaglia

The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do. — Dave Eggers

Sometimes people leave us because staying becomes an impossibility. Because the world just gets too small. Or, sometimes, because there is just one boat, and too many hands ... Because maybe, life can be a bit bigger than it exists today. And because, somewhere else, there may be another boat. — Collier Lumpkin

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it's not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren't born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at. — David Mitchell

Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right. This putting right (the biblical word for it is "justice") is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus's followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it's what we need. — N. T. Wright

How can we do this? We are told that our world is too small for men of eternal life. This is true. We must become pioneers again, we must break out into new territories! The men of old carved living space from the wilderness; we must do the same, and let this be the condition for eternal life! Is it not sufficient? When a man creates his living space and guarantees his sustenance, is he not entitled to life? — Jack Vance

Well, normally I'm against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big. - Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year) — Pete Seeger

The world itself is too small for the covetous. — Seneca The Younger

Death pulls people from our spaces so often and we accept it as our final payment for having been here and having lived, however big or small. We don't always have time to notice how things have changed in the absence of some of them. But then death pulls away someone we love, and we find that time. In here, we notice everything; growing grass and fingernails, and songs that end in a minor key. We are too sad to do anything else but watch a clock, applying seconds, minutes, and hours to the trauma and the lacerations. Time, the forever healer, they say. We find the time to wonder how everyone else is moving on, around our paralyzed selves. Ourselves unsure of roads and trees and birds and things. It all blurs and words aren't words anymore. We find the time to attempt to figure a way to rethink everything we thought about this world and why we came to it. — Darnell Lamont Walker

The world is getting too small for both an Us and a Them. Us and Them have become codependent, intertwined, fixed to one another. We have no separate fates, but are bound together in one. And our fear of one another is the only thing capable of our undoing. — Sam Killermann

One kernel is felt in a hogshead; one drop of water helps to swell the ocean; a spark of fire helps to give light to the world. None are too small, too feeble, too poor to be of service. Think of this and act. — Hannah More

Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbors without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralized by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year's crop. Mr. — George Eliot

Children's Song
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven. — R.S. Thomas

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count. — Andrei Tarkovsky

No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is ... dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.
I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend. — Dean Koontz