Insignificance Quotes

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you.”
― Steve Martin

“We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”
― Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance

“Tiny-perhaps." Rovender kept his eyes fixed on the rings. "Insignificant-never, Eva Nine. No living thing is insignificant.”
― Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa

“I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”
― William Golding, The Spire

“It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
― Edith Wharton

“Never make the mistake of thinking you are alone — or inconsequential. Ignorance is voluntary and confusion is temporary. You see the world as-is, which is more than can be said for the vast populace.”
― Rebecca McKinsey, Sydney West

“One day when I went to see him (Picasso), we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, 'Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I'm concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.'I told him I had often noticed in his dealings with others that he considered the rest of the world only little grains of dust. But I said, as it happened, I was a little grain of dust gifted with autonomous movement and who didn't therefore need a broom. I could go out by myself.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“Being born really isn't that uncommon... Almost everything in this world is meant to die. In this world, a life born is nothing more than an insignificant speck, and shouldn't even be counted as an existence. Death is natural. (Episode 49)”
― Johan Liebert

“There are more stars than there are people. Billions, Alan had said, and millions of them might have planets just as good as ours. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt too big. But now I felt small. Too small. Too small to count. Every star is massive, but there are so many of them. How could anyone care about one star when there were so many spare? And what if stars were small? What if all the stars were just pixels? And earth was less than a pixel? What does that make us? And what does that make me? Not even dust. I felt tiny. For the first time in my life I felt too small.”
― Frank Cottrell Boyce, Cosmic

“The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved.

It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit.

She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“There is, I believe, no person, however insignificant in the world, but, if an account of his life and adventures were committed to paper, would be entertaining in some degree: the follies of our own life, and those we are liable to be drawn into by others, will constantly afford matter for serious reflection.”
― Henry Spencer Ashbee

“For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory

“His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.”
― William Golding, The Spire

“struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature.”
― Garth Stein

“It had to happen to someone. There is nothing exceptional about you, any more than there is about the first neutron that starts the chain reaction in an atomic bomb. It simply happens to be the first. Any other neutron would have served”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

“Edward:
But I'm obsessed by the thought of my own significance.

Rielly:
Precisely. And I could make you feel important,
And you would imagine it a marvelous cure; And you would go on, doing such amount of mischief
As lay within your power -- until you came to grief.
Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm--but the harm does not interest them
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“9-11 pales into insignificance when compared to what the USA unleashed onto Iran and Afghanistan.”
― Steven Magee

“On a cosmic scale, it seems that the life of a single plant or animal is completely insignificant. Then, on the same scale, I also am insignificant; and you, too. In fact, everyone and everything is insignificant, and therefore no one and nothing is insignificant.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees.

If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“The lesser my personality, the more I take things personally. The more insignificant my contribution or influence in society, the more I’m convinced that the whole world is against me.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Quand l’important se fait socialement reconnaître comme ce qui est instantané, et va l’être encore l’instant d’après, autre et même, et que remplacera toujours une autre importance instantanée, on peut aussi bien dire que le moyen employé garantit une sorte d’éternité de cette non-importance, qui parle si haut.

“When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and to what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee an eternity of noisy insignificance.”
― Guy Debord

“It's our nature," Lillath once said. "We made up honour and justice to beat back the dark in our own hearts, but the universe doesn't care about our desperate little stories. The universe has never heard of honour.”
― Laure Eve, Blackheart Knights

“Living is a like waiting for a bus, with no posted schedule, that comes once every day. You're not waiting for #168, you're waiting for happiness. Sometimes you catch the bus, but it never takes you as far as you want to go, as far as you need to go. What good is a five minute ride when you have eight hours ahead? If anything, the ride pisses you off; you're zooming at seventy miles an hour, comfortable, air-conditioned and laid-back, when suddenly you get kicked out, into the blazing sun, to carry your heavy backpack the rest of the way.

The bus can drop you off at indifference, insignificance, loneliness, anxiety, anger, or depression. Some three-hundred pound thug kicks you off and lets another wanderer on. You walk for hours with an aching back, sweating like a pig, hopeless and helpless, and all the while you're thinking, god damn, this would have taken 20 minutes on the bus. You whine and moan hoping someone will lend a helping hand, hoping someone will reach out to you and save you, but everyone only has trite, meaningless expressions to give. Let me clear up a common misconception: you will never help anybody by telling them to "feel better." "Feel better" isn't an air-conditioned ride.

What happens when you arrive, eight hours later, at the end of the road? I don't know either. I doubt you ever get there.”
― Byron Bernstein

“Every time I was pummeled, kicked, or otherwise done over, I felt a sense of relief, like an artificial pearl whose false exterior was being scraped away—an exterior that previously I had struggled fiercely to protect, determined not to let it be damaged or broken. Now that it was gone and I had nothing left to cover up or gloss over, I knew that whatever remained, exposed for all to see, was nothing less than my true self. The discovery of my own insignificance brought instant, indescribable relief.”
― Kaoru Nonomura, Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple

“You just the organ grinder monkey, he told her. Alvin turns the crank and you just hold the cup for the pennies.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“...isn't everyone with any degree of self-knowledge an insignificant person?...”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognise that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“To think of our greatest anxiety as an insignificant event, not only in the life of the universe but also in the life of our own soul, is the beginning of wisdom. To think this way right in the midst of our anxiety is the height of wisdom. While we're actually suffering, our human pain seems infinite. But human pain isn't infinite, because nothing human is infinite, and our pain has no value beyond its being a pain we feel.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The first law of everything is that the world don’t usually give a fuck about our problems — we are our own little thing and the world is its own infinite thing.”
― Junot Díaz