A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on
me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me
shillelagh out next, wait'll you see.”
Source: The Cripple Of Inishmaan
“An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.”
“An Irishman walks into a pub,” she begins and the bar went silent. “The bartender asks him, ‘What'll you have?’” Her Irish accent was spot on. “The man says, ‘Give me three pints of Guinness, please.’ The bartender brings him three pints and the man proceeds to alternately sip one, then the other, then the third until they're gone. He then orders three more.
“The bartender says, ‘Sir, no need to order as many at a time. I’ll keep an eye on it and when you get low, I'll bring you a fresh one.’ The man replies, ‘You don't understand. I have two brothers, one in Australia and one in the States. We made a vow to each other that every Saturday night we'd still drink together. So right now, me brothers have three Guinness stouts too, and we're drinking together.’
“The bartender thought this a wonderful tradition and every week the man came in and ordered three beers.” January’s playing and voice became more solemn, dramatic. “But one week, he ordered only two.” The crowd oohed and ahhed. “He slowly drank them,” she continued darkly, “and then ordered two more. The bartender looked at him sadly. ‘Sir, I know your tradition, and, agh, I'd just like to say that I'm sorry for your loss.’
“The man looked on him strangely before it finally dawned on him. ‘Oh, me brothers are fine - I just quit drinking.”
Source: Thomas & January
“An Irishman will always soften bad news, so that a major coronary is no more than 'a bad turn' and a near hurricane that leaves thousands homeless is 'good drying weather'.”
“An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.”
“An Irishman's wife gave birth to twins. Her husband wanted to know who the other man was.”
“An iron chain is less difficult to break than a chain of flowers.”
“An iron curtain has descended over Europe.”
“An iron rod being placed on the outside of a building from the highest part continued down into the moist earth, in any direction strait or crooked, following the form of the roof or other parts of the building, will receive the lightning at its upper end, attracting it so as to prevent it's striking any other part; and, affording it a good conveyance into the earth, will prevent its damaging any part of the building.”
Source: Not Your Usual Founding Father: Selected Readings from Benjamin Franklin
“An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices.”
Source: The Savage Girl
“An irony, when senior citizens need respect the most, they are left vulnerable.”
“An irrational fear is just as scary if not scarier than one that’s justified. FDR said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ yet he was actually deathly afraid of the number thirteen.”
Source: In Limbo
“An irrational kind of heartbreak, based more on the relationship I'd built inside my head than anything that had existed within the world. I was a widow, mourning the loss of a husband that never existed and who didn't have a grave.”
Source: Love Letters to a Serial Killer
“An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.”
Source: The History of Creation: Or The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes. A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and of that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular. From the 8th German Ed. of Ernst Haeckel ... The Translation Rev. by E. Ray Lankester
“An irrelevance, and your life's altered.”
Source: The collected works of Aldous Huxley
“An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.”
“An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition.
It prefers a lie, no matter how idiotic it may be.”
“An irresistable footnote: in 1971, pension fund managers invested a record 122% of net funds available in equities - at full prices they couldn't buy enough of them. In 1974, after the bottom had fallen out, they committed a then record low of 21% to stocks.”
“An irresistible fascination with terrifying death killed me ahead of time.”
“An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it.”
Source: Letters of Ayn Rand
“An ISBN is assigned to each specific format of a book and never reused. Like golf, the rules are made-up and simple, but can be misinterpreted or applied incorrectly.”
Source: My Publishing Imprint: How to Create a Self-Publishing Book Imprint & ISBN Essentials
“An Islamic writer recalls her joy in the clothes she wore as a young girl at a wedding: They were always in beautiful bright colors: crimson, pink, turquoise, purple, and embroidered with sparkling crystals, sequins and beads. ... The older girls and women would wear glamorous heavily-beaded silk blouses and long, princess-like skirts. I wanted to wear those fairy-tale clothes too. I longed even more to wear a sari which the women wore so elegantly and which flattered their curves.”
“An Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose Shariah on others, including many ‘cultural’ or secular Muslims.”
Source: A Dark Time in America
“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”
“An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.”
“An island of surety in a changing world.”
“An island Utopia in a modern, busy, everyday world. A land where there are neither rich nor poor. A heaven on earth - without a fence around it.”
“An isolated man like Alexander Selkirk might feel the benefit of a stock of provisions, tools and other means of facilitating industry, although cut off from traffic, with other men.”
Source: The Theory of Political Economy
“An isolated outbreak of virginity is a rash on the face of society. It arouses only pity from the married, and embarrassment from the single.”
“An isolated pawn spreads gloom all over the chessboard.”
“An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.”
“An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.”
“An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.”
“An Israeli man's life was saved when he was given a Palestinian man's heart in a heart transplant operation. The guy is doing fine, but the bad news is, he can't stop throwing rocks at himself.”
“An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place.”
“An Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.”
“An It bag is an It bag, only if you’re unlikely to possess it.”
“An IT friendly Board should change the perspective to understand the power of information and the potential of technology.”
Source: Digitizing Boardroom: The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards
“An IT-friendly board should oversee the business strategy with IT strategy as an integral component.”
Source: Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as
“An it harm none, do what ye will.”
Source: Witchcraft for Tomorrow
“An Italian migrant once told me that … and he said, ‘To be a migrant is both a curse and a blessing, because you will always hang between two countries.’ This is a very good country, I quite enjoy it, it’s fine, but I miss my country [Holland]. But I can’t go back anymore my country’s not my country anymore. Tinie Nieuwenhoven’s, Dutch”
Source: Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66
“An Italian philosopher said that "time was his estate"; an estate indeed which will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the labors of industry, and generally satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part of it be suffered to lie in waste by negligence, to be overrun with noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use.”
“An Italian piazza was my vision - a place where people would come and meet, see an exhibition, browse through books, have a drink, eat, rest, shop. Even today, the best compliment is when someone tells me that they were having a difficult day, and when they came here, they felt better.”
“An Italian proverb says, In men every mortal sin is venial; in woman every venial sin is mortal. And a German axiom, that There are only two good women in the world: one of them is dead, and the other is not to be found.”
“An Italian romance may begin in a gondola amid the marvel of Venice, but a traveler looking for the great stories of Italy will board a sailboat amid the gale force of mistral winds, confront the rough
seas and warnings of “the insane mountains” that have addled visitors for thousands of years, and then traverse the Strait of Bonifacio in search of Sardinia.”
Source: In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy
“An Italian university is a contradiction in terms.”
“An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.”
Source: Delirium
“An item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it”
“An item must have a soul, it must function properly, be nice to hold and a pleasure to look at”
“An item that looks perfectly normal on the surface might only be disguised.”
Source: Perfect Match