A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“An ill wound is cured, not an ill name.”
Source: The English poems of George Herbert, together with his collection of proverbs entitled Jacula prudentum
“An illicit love affair seems sweetly old-fashioned in the age of one night stands and orgies.”
“An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision.”
“An illogical yet humane step towards an impossible future is a thousand times better than a logical yet inhuman step towards a possible future.”
Source: Sleepless for Society
“An illuminated heart is rare; opinion is all too common. The illuminated heart sees the Divine Reality, the Balance in all things; it sees with the impartial light of Allah. Illumination says: „Let‘s see what God does, what God does is always beautiful.“ when the heart is purified, Truth becomes an objective reality that can be known by human beings. This Truth is not equivalent to the formulations of beliefs and concepts. For the human being, Truth is the direct experience of Divine Presence. Freed from our illusions and enslavement, we can go on to discover the treasure we really are, which will inevitably lead to the sharing of this treasure, a spontaneous service to Life itself. (S. 44 Holistic Islam)”
Source: Holistic Islam: Sufism, Transformation, & the Challenge of Our Time
“An illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half.”
“An illusion can never go faster than the speed limit of reality.”
“An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.”
“An illusion is just another way of seeing reality.”
Source: The Unfinished Book About Who We Are
“An illusion is when everyone is in on the joke, a delusion is when you are the joke.”
Source: Travesty
“An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time”
Source: No Compromise: Selected Writings of Karl Kraus
“An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.”
Source: The Dogma of Christ: and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture
“An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“An illusion which makes me happy is worth a verity which drags me to the ground.”
“An illusionist can make himself disappear; a musician can do the same thing: When he plays a piano, after a while we start seeing only the music, not the man!”
“An illustration is a visual editorial - its just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.”
“An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.”
Source: Francis Bacon
“An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.”
“An image began to form in her mind. There were streets, narrow and crowded with people and vehicles. Above them flashed neon lights and blinking billboards of every colour, shape and size. Some ran up the sides of buildings, others blinked on and off in store windows. In the space above the sidewalk, higher than a double-decker bus, hung flashing neon signs in bright pink, yellow, red, blue, orange, green and white. Yes, if white could be whiter than white, it was when it was in neon, Hong Mei thought. She knew Nathan Road in Kowloon was famous for its neon lights. Were these streets of Kowloon that she was seeing it her head?”
Source: Year of the Golden Dragon
“An image can only be one element in constructing a sequence of understanding.”
“An image drawn from recent experience may have transferred to it a feeling which first belonged to an experience much older.”
Source: The Poetic Mind
“An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?”
Source: Lost For Words
“An image forms in my mind, the sight of a rabid animal locked in a cage. I'm that animal and this wheelchair is my cage.”
Source: Second Chance
“An image has stuck for most of my career and it isn't flattering.”
Source: Fowler: My Autobiography
“An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.”
“An image is a mere reflection. Do not fear the reflection. Fear the reality it reflects.”
Source: The Image: A Quantum Portal Has Opened
“An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.”
Source: Nightwood
“An image is always only showing what's necessary for a thought, not the thought itself.”
“An image is better than one thousand words”
“An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.”
Source: Philosophical Investigations
“An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service.”
Source: The Image or What Happened to the American Dream
“An image is simply an external memoir of one's life.”
“An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happens that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discover the truth, because of his own efforts.”
“An image of Charlotte hung permanently in Robin's head these days, like a shadowy portrait she'd never wanted hung . . . Last night, though, that image had become stark and fixed: a darkly romantic vision of a lost and dying love, breathing her final words in Strike's ear as she lay among the trees.”
Source: Troubled Blood
“An image of Luc’s face flashed on my screen, his finger waggling. “Time to go outside!” it said. “Time to go outside!” I tried to silence it, reduce the volume, and turn off the phone, but to no avail. Luc had definitely created a reminder for our outdoor guarding duties—and there was no way to turn it off. I grimaced at the phone and showed it to Ethan. “We have a monster on our hands.”
Source: Biting Bad
“An image of myself, in a year’s time, passed in front of my eyes. Rolled. An image of a giant bagel with legs and arms fluttering about rolled in front of my eyes.”
Source: Earth Won't Miss You
“An image of the earth, its landscapes, directly affects people. The beauty of the earth creates enormous emotion, and through that emotion, you can transmit knowledge and raise consciousness”
“An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.”
Source: Dialogues II
“An image often propels the novel, gets it started. For me, it's an image that has a lot of emotion connected to it.”
“An image resists explanation. You relate to it or you do not. You cannot disagree with an image. Through identification with an image you comprehend a totality, rather than learn particular facts.”
Source: The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis
“An image suddenly loomed in his mind: the greenhouse effect. Yes. The Earth is a gigantic greenhouse. With us planted here millions of years ago by aliens. Soon they’ll be back for the harvest.”
Source: Handling the Undead
“An image that is unseen can't sell anything. It is pure, therefore true, beautiful, in one word: innocent. As long as no eye contaminates it, it is in perfect unison with the world. If it is not seen, the image and the object it represents belong together.”
“An image, a dance step, a song may function from time to time as entertainment, but the root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between the self and all that is important, all that is sacred.”
Source: No More Secondhand Art
“An imaginary baby is so much easier than a real baby. No diapers to change.”
“An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database.
If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our
teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear.
The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet.
A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The fight over abortion asks whether a fetus or embryo should be in the circle or not, and the animal rights debate asks the same about animals.
When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself. The center of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle.
Empathy Inflation and Metaphysical Ambiguity
Are there any legitimate reasons not to expand the circle as much as possible?
There are.
To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities (as perceived by only some people) can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. An obvious example of this is found in the abortion debate. If outlawing abortions did not involve commandeering control of the bodies of other people (pregnant women, in this case), then there wouldn't be much controversy. We would find an easy accommodation.
Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?”
Source: You Are Not a Gadget
“An imaginary friend once asked me why Americans can't stand Russia. The answer was cold, deadly, silent, and, well expected. It’s because in Soviet Russia nothing happens anymore, because it doesn’t exist anymore. And Americans are all about happenings. If there isn’t one – they don’t go where it isn’t, because there isn’t anything to happen to them there.”
Source: Nothing is here...
“An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face ... Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs.”
Source: Queer
“An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.”
Source: Gravity and Grace
“An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today.”
“An imagination left alone in the dark can be a terrible thing.”
Source: The Madwoman Upstairs