#Insignificance Quotes

“He knows what it's like to strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then be heard no more.”

“I wonder that you will still be talking. Nobody marks you.”

“Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.”

“The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.”

“Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto”

“For such things as you, I can scarce think there's any, ye're so slight.”

“To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?”

“When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?”

“The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.”

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

“We are anthill men upon an anthill world.”

“Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it's like we don't even exist.”

“Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself: and the whole earth too is a point.”

“Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited.”

“From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.”

“Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.”

“I am almost equal to a shadow.”

“Surely mortal man is a broomstick!”

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”

“Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, "That's nothing wonderful," Diogenes said, "for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same."”

“All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.”

“What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?”

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”

“I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker - a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten.”