Top 100 Quotes About Insignificance
#1. There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.
Gabriel Chevallier
#2. A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#4. One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
Joseph Conrad
#5. Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought about the insignificance of grandeur, about the insignificance of life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and about the still greater insignificance of death, the meaning of which no one among the living could understand or explain.
Leo Tolstoy
#6. Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Thomas Hardy
#8. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
Ian McEwan
#9. But time soon passes. Even the deepest pain eventually loses its edge in the more vivid reality of the present; then, what once was unbearable becomes strangely familiar. And after much familiarity, it assumes the insignificance of just another milestone, ever marking the journey to higher ground.
N. Maria Kwami
#10. For me, science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.
Paul Davies
#11. Space was more appropriate for the Sith than for the Jedi. The invisible enslavement to gravity, the contained power of the stars, the utter insignificance of life ... Hyperspace, by contrast, was more suitable to the Jedi: nebulous, neither here nor
James Luceno
#12. A great many persons are able to become Members of this House without losing their insignificance.
Beverley Baxter
#13. Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that enormous whole.
Leo Tolstoy
#14. I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.
Thomas Hardy
#15. Our task and challenge as human beings is to appreciate, in the same instant, both the infinite significance and absolute insignificance of life.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
#16. The time has come for us to admit our insignificance by making discoveries in the infinite unexplored cosmos. Only then shall we realize that we are nothing but ants in the vast state of the universe. And yet our future and our opportunities lie in the universe, where gods promised they would.
Erich Von Daniken
#17. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
Bernard Beckett
#18. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life
Andrew Solomon
#19. I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
William, Saroyan
#20. One feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy.
Albert Einstein
#21. It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.
Cathleen Schine
#22. And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.
Carl Sagan
#23. Most people seemed to rate the discovery of America pretty highly; I'd have to say that, for me, it paled into insignificance beside the discovery of my prostate.
J.L. Merrow
#24. Transcendence is a healthy dose of insignificance to a race whose root sin is pride. Transcendence cuts us all down to our proper proportion before an awesome God. That you and I are not significant is a wonderful, freeing discovery, and that's what church is for.
James MacDonald
#25. If you consider the contribution of plumbing to human life, the other sciences fade into insignificance.
James P. Gorman
#26. Philosophic argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe, in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me that
Daniel Webster
#27. The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.
Colin Wilson
#28. We realise our existence is confined to our being. Our demise makes not a whit difference to the world around us, nor to the scheme of things.
We come to our senses; we understand our utter insignificance.
Umera Ahmed
#29. Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow
#30. To realize that everything in the universe is connected is to both accept our insignificance and understand our importance in it.
Jeffrey Fry
#31. 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
#32. The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#33. Quote from CARE OF THE SOUL ... Thomas Moore ... to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfullness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparant insignificance.
Thomas Moore
#34. Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety.
Aesop
#35. Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.
George S. Patton
#36. To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?
Amor Towles
#37. The Insignificance of Man is a congenial theme; my own insignificance is a sore point.
Mason Cooley
#38. Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God
R.C. Sproul
#39. And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence - our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.
Irvin D. Yalom
#40. He would have considered it ironic that, the more men discovered the insignificance of their planet, the more highly they would rate themselves, all the more sure that they could explain everything without reference to God. They
John Charles Pollock
#41. Fear of insignificance creates the result it dreads, arrives at the destination it tries to avoid, facilitates the scenario it disdains.
Max Lucado
#42. Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.
Melvil Dewey
#43. How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#44. Anyone who thinks they're important is usually just a pompous moron who can't deal with his or her own pathetic insignificance and the fact that what they do is meaningless and inconsequential.
William Thomas
#45. It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.
Edwin Way Teale
#46. I just wish insignificance had more stature.
Andy Rooney
#47. The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
Erich Fromm
#49. There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.
W. H. Auden
#50. In comparison to what I've suffered from myself, the humiliation and suffering inflicted on me by others vanishes into insignificance.
Heimito Von Doderer
#51. We as humans are the patterns of life. We are the roads we travel. Our lives make up the insignificance of a moment of the importance of a second. The choices we make are everything. I realize that, now that everything has changed and I'm a different person.
Megan Duke
#52. There is something in a tropical forest akin to the ocean in its effect on the mind. Man feels so completely his insignificance there and the vastness of nature.
Henry Walter Bates
#53. 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
#54. The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.
Thomas Huxley
#55. The uncertainty and importance of the present reduce the past and future to comparative insignificance, and clear the mind of minor worries. And when all is over, memories remain which few men do not hold precious.
Winston S. Churchill
#56. The Milky Way swooped diagonally across the heavens, reminding me of my utter insignificance, and at the same time my complete interconnection with everything. I was just a tiny speck of consciousness, and yet I was consciousness itself.
Roz Savage
#57. Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.
Gary Greenberg
#58. 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
#59. The shadow of someone's greatness is not a good place to dwell. Being the next someone else pales into insignificance against being the first you.
John Paul Bernett
#60. 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
#61. What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.
David Gascoyne
#62. Despite the mosque's perfection as a whole, it contained many deliberate mistakes in the symmetry of the tile work in order to symbolize the craftsman's humility and his insignificance when compared to Allah.
Jamie Maslin
#63. What causes us to think of prayer as the last option rather than the first? I can think of two reasons: feelings of independence and feelings of insignificance.
Max Lucado
#64. Our concerns sink into insignificance when compared with the eternal value of human personality - a potential child of God which is destined to triumph over lie, pain, and death. No one can take this sublime meaning of life away from us, and this is the one thing that matters.
Igor Sikorsky
#65. Hence that dread and amazement with which as Scripture uniformly relates holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God. Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance until they have.
John Calvin
#66. Death is the great adventure beside which moon landings and space trips pale in insignificance.
Joseph Bayly
#67. The exchange of money for my willing participation was served on a silver platter, requiring nothing more than the abandonment of my principles and the departure of virtue, which fell in between the cracks of insignificance, given in trade for the simple comforts I once knew. - from "Plight" 2015
Don Swann II
#68. Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
Milan Kundera
#69. If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]
William Hazlitt
#70. 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
#71. Control never lasted. Eventually the illusion of time, the pull of gravity, and catastrophic events reminded everyone of their mortality and their utter insignificance in the great big world. Life was nothing more than one lone blink. Here today. Gone tomorrow.
Jewel E. Ann
#72. What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
Ernest Becker
#74. He began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears into the sea.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#75. The immensity of the universe with the vastness of space and uncountable heavenly bodies is so outside our control and power. What is man compared to such awesome magnificence? It is a humbling experience to note one's insignificance.
Sharon Lathan
#76. Let the fires of truth burn away your false life and your excuses, fears, blaming, doubts and illusions of insignificance.
Bryant McGill
#77. 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
#78. Your memory does me more honour than my insignificance deserves.
Charles Dickens
#79. I cannot say that I regret my comparative insignificance, Importance may sometimes be purchased too dearly.
Jane Austen
#80. The problem you have isn't a delusion of grandeur; it's a delusion of insignificance.
Steve Maraboli
#81. Retirement is a one-way trip to insignificance.
Mason Cooley
#82. Compared with the awesome might and eternal power of the ocean, no human being can fail to be reminded of their own insignificance.
Roz Savage
#83. A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
T. S. Eliot
#84. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.
David Foster Wallace
#85. Every man was conscious of his own insignificance, aware that he was but a grain of sand in that ocean of humanity, and yet at the same time had a sense of power as a part of that vast whole.
Leo Tolstoy
#86. A celebration of insignificance. Is that all we are in the end?
Steven Erikson
#87. Questions of personal priority, however interesting they may be to the persons concerned, sink into insignificance in the prospect of any gain of deeper insight into the secrets of nature.
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
#88. If you come from insignificance and when you die you return to insignificance, then nothing is significant now.
Timothy Keller
#89. When old friends get together, everything else fades to insignificance.- War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death
Robert Asprin
#90. Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny. These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#91. Despite every objection; they sank into insignificance - and in the end, love, was the answer to everything.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#92. I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.
Billy Collins
#93. When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.
Rollo May
#94. We need to overcome this fear of insignificance and replace it with a mind-set of contribution.
Todd Henry
#95. What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It's precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said.
Michel Houellebecq
#97. There is no such thing as an insignificant life, only the insignificance of mind that refuses to grasp the implications.
Laurence Overmire
#98. There are girls, not specially beautiful, whom you could not lose in a crowd. There are other girls, apparently perfect in beauty, who seem to melt into insignificance.
Mack Sennett
#99. Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.
Thomas Szasz
#100. Pornography is just 'fast-food feminine energy', it will always leave you wanting more, with little or no nutritional value. There is nothing ful-filling about pornography, it pales in insignificance to a fully embodied loving woman.
Barry Long
