Insignificance Quotes - Page 4

• One feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy.

  Albert Einstein

  Individual, Feels

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.23, St. Martin's Press

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• A man of the utmost insignificance.

  George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

  Men

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

  Milan Kundera

  Tragedy, Mazes, Shells

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

  Charles Yu

  Lying, Mirrors, Doors

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• Literature sort of makes your daily operation, your daily conduct, the management of your affairs in the society a bit more complex. And it puts what you do in perspective, and people don't like to see themselves or their activities in perspective. They don't feel quite comfortable with that. Nobody wants to acknowledge the insignificance of his life, and that is very often the net result of reading a poem.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Reading, Perspective, People

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Unquestionably the truth or fallacy of the theory of the survival of the soul is by far the most tremendous question that can exercise the human mind. The more you think of it, the more all other questions seem to sink into utter insignificance, for only if survival be true, can the Universe be rationalized at all.

  Ernest MacBride

  Exercise, Thinking, Soul

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• The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.

  Vasily Grossman

  Taken, Responsibility, People

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• Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one's dignity.

  Anton Chekhov

  People, May, Dignity

  Letter to his brother, M. P. Chekhov, April 1879.

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• I fear insignificance more than I fear failure.

  Orrin Woodward

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• If you come from insignificance and when you die you return to insignificance, then nothing is significant now.

  Timothy Keller

  Return, Significant, Dies

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• You know better than I that in a Republic talent is always suspect. A man attains an elevated position only when his mediocrity prevents him from being a threat to others. And for this reason a democracy is never governed by the most competent, but rather by those whose insignificance will not jeopardize anyone else's self-esteem.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Self Esteem, Men, Democracy

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• There is one thing that makes life mighty in its veriest trifles, worthy in its smallest deeds, that delivers it from monotony, that delivers it from insignificance. All will be great, nothing will be overpowering, when, living in communion with Jesus Christ, we say as He says, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Jesus, Meat, Deeds

  Alexander Maclaren (1873). “Sermons Preached in Manchester: third series”, p.282

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

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Animal, Safety, Giving

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

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• When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

  Marcel Proust

  Past, Self, Different

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.537, Modern Library

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• The money cost of the reservoir plan literally fades into insignificance when it is compared with the financial burden which the great depression imposed on the nation.

  Benjamin Graham

  Cost, Financial, Great Depression

  "Storage and Stability". Book by Benjamin Graham. Part II, Chapter IX, The Cost of the Reservoir Plan, p. 114, 1937.

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• Ever since the Reformation, the case of legislation confining Catholics had been constructed primarily to protect a nervously Protestant against what was assumed to be a fifth column in its midst... Ministers believedm with some justice, that Catholics retained an attachment to their exiled co-religionists, the princes of the House of Stuart. After the Battle of Culloden had confirmed Jacobitism's insignificance, however, government attitudes towards Catholicism began perceptibly and logically to relax.

  Linda Colley

  Attitude, Government, Attachment

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• As the rays of the sun, notwithstanding their velocity, injure not the eye, by reason of their minuteness, so the attacks of envy, notwithstanding their number, ought not to wound our virtue by reason of their insignificance.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Eye, Numbers, Envy

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.190

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• it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Women, History, Historical

  Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

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• If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.

  Agnes Repplier

  Church, Sides, Demand

  Agnes Repplier (1904). “Compromises”

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• Anger is the common refuge of insignificance. People who feel their character to be slight, hope to give it weight by inflation: but the blown bladder at its fullest distention is still empty.

  Hannah More

  Anger, Character, People

  Hannah More (1835). “The works of Hannah More”, p.106

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• It is not quite true that there are no good letters written in America: among my own circle of correspondents there, there are ladies and gentlemen whose letters would stand a comparison with any for frankness, grace, and epistolary beauty of every kind. But I am not aware of any medium between this excellence and the boarding-school insignificance which characterizes the rest.

  Harriet Martineau

  School, Circles, America

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.110

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• The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.

  Carl Jung

  Sex, Real, Men

  Carl Gustav Jung, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1970). “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Civilization in transition”

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• If you consider the contribution of plumbing to human life, the other sciences fade into insignificance.

  James P. Gorman

  Technology, Human Life, Plumbing

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• I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Pride, Eminence

  "Libussa". Play by Franz Grillparzer. Act 2, 1848.

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• Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.

  Melvil Dewey

  Reading, Electricity, Steam

  Melvil Dewey (1888). “Libraries as Related to the Educational Work of the State”

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