119 World-Inspiring Quotes

In a world filled with constant noise and distraction, sometimes all it takes is a few powerful words to inspire and uplift our spirits. Whether you're facing a challenging moment, looking for a dose of motivation, or seeking wisdom from great minds, the right quote can make all the difference. We've scoured the annals of history and the musings of iconic figures to bring you a curated collection of the top 119 world-inspiring quotes. Each one is carefully selected to resonate, provoke thought, and ignite your inner fire. Dive in and let these timeless words guide you towards a more enlightened and empowered version of yourself.

1. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

2. “Beneath the makeup and behind the smile I am just a girl who wishes for the world.” - Marilyn Monroe

3. “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.” - Thomas Traherne

4. “No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.” - R.A. Salvatore

5. “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” - William Shakespeare

6. “How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?” - R.A. Salvatore

7. “There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.” - Banksy

8. “We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.” - Chuck Palahniuk

9. “I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world. ” - Leo Tolstoy

10. “Good Godfrey!” - Joan Hiatt Harlow

11. “Le monde ne vaut que par les ultras et ne dure que par les modérés.” - Valéry

12. “The world is'nt such a bad place at all - as long as one did'nt read the daily newspaper” - Bill Aitken

13. “Do you mean to say," asked Caspian, "that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you've never told me! It's really too bad for you. Because we have fairy-tales in which there are round worlds and I have always loved them … Have you ever been to the parts where people walk about upside-down?" Edmund shook his head. "And it isn't like that," he added. "There's nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you're there.” - C.S. Lewis

14. “There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me” - Gustave Flaubert

15. “They have money and position and Ann has none.It's amazing how often you can be right as long as you have those two things working in your favor.” - Libba Bray

16. “We sat in the car & the night droppeddown until the only sounds werethe crickets &the dance of our voices& for a momentthe world becamesmall enough toroll back & forth between us.” - Brian Andreas

17. “Glory: I look around at this world you're so eager to be a part of and all I see is six billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who's not crazy? Look around, everyone's drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other, or just plain screwing their brains out 'cause they don't want 'em anymore. I'm crazy? Honey, I'm the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind, 'cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts.” - Douglas Petrie

18. “The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.” - Mark Doty

19. “Ash? Get bent and die.” - L.J. Smith

20. “There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.” - Cormac McCarthy

21. “Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.” - Michael Richardson

22. “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” - Wendell Berry

23. “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

24. “It's only through sheer force and luck that she's yet to take over the world.” - Julia Quinn

25. “We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...” - Jeffrey Eugenides

26. “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.” - Stanisław Lem

27. “This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” - Henry David Thoreau

28. “In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and even clothes, the discussion of fur is childish.” - Karl Lagerfeld

29. “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

30. “A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing.” - Vera Nazarian

31. “The world is such a marvel-it gave you trials, but if you were still and concentrated, if you tried to do the right thing, it always provided you with salvation.” - Anna Godbersen

32. “Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people.[as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]” - Paul McHugh

33. “I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.” - Justina Chen Headley

34. “Her two worlds, two lives that she tried so hard to keep separate, were crashing together. And she felt helpless to stop it.” - Aprilynne Pike

35. “There are people who desperately want to change the world. I wonder if it could be measured, because the world is already in the state of continuously change since the beginning of time. Or they may just want their names etched nicely on men history.” - Toba Beta

36. “Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last.” - Jack Kerouac

37. “Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.” - Kim Edwards

38. “I can never feel that the Illusion of Life is a truth as long as any illusion reflects unreality; however, even an untruth is a truth in its turn.” - Sorin Cerin

39. “Where does the world’s zephyr strike from the view which let you to live the eternal moment of love other than in the Divine Light of sight?” - Sorin Cerin

40. “In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.” - Carl Gustav Jung

41. “The dawn of beauty always comes after night.” - Sorin Cerin

42. “when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ” - Steiner G

43. “If there were a master of stupidity in this world, I would really love to listen to his success story.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

44. “There are very few things that live in both this world and the world of dreams. Most are gods, angels and demons. The Stone you hold was made by Vlad Valkire the son of an angel and a demon. By the divine blood that ran in his veins, Valkire could see the light and hear the song of creation -- if only as glimmerings and whispers. "Over time, he became aware of the light and the music and as he grew so did his understanding of it. At the age of twenty two, he began his greatest labor -- the making of the Wyrd Stones. In them he captured the light and song of creation and by them some of the powers of gods, angels and demons fell into the hands of elves and men. A sorcerer who knows its secret may -- like a god, angel, or demon -- stand with one foot in this world and another within the world of dreams. "Your Stone is a gateway into the world of dreams, Luthiel. When you sing, it opens and you are, in part, taken there. Others who hold a Wyrd Stone like yours may know when someone crosses into dream. When you sang, I could hear you quite clearly.” - Robert Fanney

45. “The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.” - Ray Bradbury

46. “After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.” - Sebastian Barry

47. “It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.” - Bram Stoker

48. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” - Alan Wilson Watts

49. “Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.” - Deb Caletti

50. “We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.” - George Eliot

51. “Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.” - Chuck Palahniuk

52. “A voice within me is sobbing, "You see that's what's become of you. You're surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don't listen to the advice of your own better half." Believe me, I'd like to listen, but it doesn't work, because if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I'm not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and setatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can't keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, an finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.Yours, Anne M. Frank.” - Anne Frank

53. “Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.” - Jodi Picoult

54. “War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?” - Mike Norton

55. “…but he realized he would never reconcile himself to life as something other than a prelude. What’s life’s meaning then? What is it? What does make the world go round, not letting hope die? What do people dream about, watching the endless flow of years? They dream. A dream, that’s it. We live for our only dream, which can lead us, hand in hand, through our life; for the dream we reconcile ourselves to any frustrations and we shall struggle for releasing its silky wings from the net of reality. (The right to a mistake.)” - Lara Biuts

56. “Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it.” - Oswald Chambers

57. “Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round".” - T.F. Hodge

58. “Dünya değişiyor dostlarım. Günün birinde gökyüzünde, güz mevsiminde artık esmer lekeler göremeyeceksiniz. Günün birinde yol kenarlarında, toprak anamızın koyu yeşil saçlarını da göremeyeceksiniz. Bizim için değil ama, çocuklar, sizin için kötü olacak. Biz kuşları ve yeşillikleri çok gördük. Sizin için kötü olacak. Benden hikâyesi.” - Sait Faik Abasıyanık

59. “As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you.” - James Van Praagh

60. “I'm very down to Earth, I'm just not from this Earth.” - Karl Lagerfeld

61. “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubt.” - Leah Wilson

62. “There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.” - Isaac Marion

63. “You have to find what sparks a light in you so that you in your own way can illuminate the world.” - Oprah Winfrey

64. “She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.” - Orhan Pamuk

65. “I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.” - Hark Herald Sarmiento

66. “The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates” - Dan Millman

67. “Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to...Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth.” - Oscar Wilde

68. “Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.” - Ann Brashares

69. “Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.” - Stevie Wonder

70. “We are all born and someday we’ll all die. Most likely to some degree alone.What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?If I lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who knows where else, needless death wouldn’t be a distant symbol to me, it wouldn’t be a metaphor, it would be a reality.And I have no right to this metaphor. But I use it to console myself. To give a fraction of meaning to something enormous and needless.This realization. This realization that I will live my life in this world where I have privileges.I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly.I can wash dishes.” - Rachel Corrie

71. “Man has created technology. Technology has created man; what we are today. Electricity is our way of life. Without it many would perish.” - O.J. Rendchen

72. “I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.” - j.m.g. le clezio

73. “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.” - Edgar Mitchell

74. “Bei gleicher Umgebung lebt doch jeder in einer anderen Welt.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

75. “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.” - John Steinbeck

76. “Thy will be done, my Lord. Because you know the weakness in the heart of yourchildren, and you assign each of them only the burden they can bear. May youunderstand my love–because it is the only thing I have that is really mine, the only thing that I will be able to take with me into the next life. Please allow it to be courageous and pure; please make it capable of surviving the snares of the world.” - Paulo Coelho

77. “Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.” - Anne Ursu

78. “You are the point of origin for everything in your world: you set the standard for yourself.” - Steve Maraboli

79. “It's not a pretty world, Papa.''I've noticed,' my father said softly.” - Chaim Potok

80. “People move around so much in the world, things get lost.” - Emma Donoghue

81. “I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.” - Annie Dillard

82. “If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.” - Jeannette Walls

83. “I would stand there at times and remember how beautiful God created this world, and then I would be reassured that he would certainly take care of me and all of my loved ones.” - Diet Eman

84. “She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods. "Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry.""Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way." "A week?""That means seven days.""Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?""Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before. He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world.” - Scott Westerfeld

85. “لقد ظل العرب ثمانية قرون طوال يٌشعون على العالم علماً وفناً وأدباً وحضارة.” - المستشرقة الألمانية سيجريد هونكة

86. “When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.” - Terry Goodkind

87. “The world, we'd discovered, doesn't love you like your family loves you.” - Louis Zamperini

88. “Queria passar mais uns minutos no mundo que não fosse dominado pela hierarquia e o snobismo e a vingança.” - Christos Tsiolkas

89. “The way you think is the driving force that fashions your world thereby governing the kind of life that you live.” - Steven Redhead

90. “...everyone wants to be excited by something magical and wondrous - to be reminded of how they once saw the world ...” - John Geddes

91. “You are very harsh.''I have seen the world.” - Voltaire

92. “Christians walk as strangers in the world: They are untamed. They are free. To persevere with love, yet untamed by man, is often what leaves that open space for divine revelation when God so wills.” - Criss Jami

93. “Be focused in what you do and what you say. There is much noise in the world to detrack you.” - Moazzam Shaikh

94. “You are perceiving the world around you and you act likewise. How can you go beyond that? Simply, by observing what you do and why you do it. Be clear to yourself and you will experience everything in a new dimension. The clearer you are, the deeper and better you will be able to perceive everything around you in clarity ~” - Grigoris Deoudis

95. “Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?""Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.” - Gary D. Schmidt

96. “The physical world we live in is just the beginning.” - Doug Dillon

97. “There's not much you need to know about the world. Except how to use a sword and trust very few.” - Melina Marchetta

98. “He's been through so much and to watch that boy suffer makes me wish this world wasn't so cruel.” - Shannon A Thompson

99. “The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.” - Dejan Stojanovic

100. “Toată lumea se așteaptă ca educația să fie un drept fundamental și nu pun mare preț pe ea când o primesc!” - Agatha Christie

101. “The world expected girls to pluck and primp and put on heels. Meanwhile, boys dressed in rumpled T-shirts and baggy pants and misplace their combs, and yet you were suppose to fall at their feet? Unacceptable.” - Libba Bray

102. “There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, 'The world is awful.' Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: 'The world is awful.' That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What a masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said.” - Philip K. Dick

103. “I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.” - Dejan Stojanovic

104. “It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls.""There are always walls." I say.” - Lauren DeStefano

105. “It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul.” - Paul Hoffman

106. “No matter what is happening in the world, I continue to believe in humanity. The power of positive thinking is always enough.” - Britt Skrabanek

107. “The world is big in some ways, and so small in others.” - Ashly Lorenzana

108. “Lucrurile supreme trebuie să aibă o altă origine, una proprie lor, - ele nu ar putea lua naştere din această lume efemeră, înşelătoare, iluzorie şi mizeră, din această harababură de amăgiri şi pofte!” - Friedrich Nietzsche

109. “I knew I'd never have another moment like this. Just a single place in time where everything had come together to breathe in harmony. Time slowed and I had gathered all her restless strands in my hands; where I had come from, where I was and where I was going was one long thread as I emerged to make my way into the world.” - Belinda Jeffrey

110. “You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does.” - Haruki Murakami

111. “Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.” - Lara Biyuts

112. “There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.” - Lauren DeStefano

113. “What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.” - Terry Brooks

114. “God made the world like a knife. We have the choice to take it by the handle or the blade.” - C.J. Langenhoven

115. “always say something! is either to yourself or to the world around!” - Donald c.Nwokedi

116. “Conor, I could search the world for another swashbuckling scientist, but I doubt if I would find one like you.” - Eoin Colfer

117. “Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you” - Obama

118. “If believing were simple, then this world wouldn’t be in the mess that it is today.” - M.K. Clinton

119. “I would like to sing someone to sleep,to sit beside someone and be there.I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep.I would like to be the one in the housewho knew: The night was cold.And I would like to listen in and listen outinto you, into the world, into the woods.The clocks shout to one another striking,and one sees to the bottom of time.And down below one last, strange man walks byand rouses a strange dog.And after that comes silence.I have laid my eyes upon you wide;and they hold you gently and let you gowhen something stirs in the dark.” - Rainer Maria Rilke