First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

Mahatma Ghandi
10,869

In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde
8,581
Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known. -Oscar Wilde
8,550

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde
8,545

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Oscar Wilde
8,471
Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward. -Henry Ford
7,374

The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

Robert Frost
6,857

Half the world is composed of those who have something to say but can't; the other half is of those who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Robert Frost
6,732
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road. -Isak Dinesen
6,197

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.

Rita Mae Brown
5,802

The softest things in the world to overcome the hardest things in the world.

Lao tzu
5,505
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do. -Galileo Galilei
5,252

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Herbert Spencer
4,160

It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.

William Cobbett
1,373
Most people are on the world, not in it - having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. -John Muir
1,142

Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
582

Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
581
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible. -Albert Einstein
395

We pass through this world but once.

Stephen Jay Gould
358

What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Henry David Thoreau
335
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. -Bern Williams
323

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

David Leavitt
318

My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world.

Faye Wattleton
312
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog has made an alliance with us. -Max Depree
300

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.

Robert Quillen
300

The greatest horrors of our world, from the executions in Iran to the brutalities of the IRA, are committed by people who are totally sincere.

John Mortimer
298
The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale. -Stanley Kubrick
294

Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.

Philipus Aureolus Paracelsus
291

Behind their lively, searching eyes one senses a doubting, a contemplative personality, always trying to make sense out of a puzzling world.

Adriaan Kortlandt
270
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. -Thomas Dekker
264