I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I have observed 100,000 families over my years of investment counseling. I always saw greater prosperity and happiness among those families who tithed than among those who didn't.”
“I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.”
Source: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays
“I have observed gratitude to be a principle, that bears the smallest share in the hearts of those where it ought to be most strongly resident, so that I begin to imagine one half of the world don't understand the real etymology of the word.”
“I have observed in foolish awe
The dateless mid-days of the law
And seen indifferent justice done
By everyone on everyone.”
Source: Collected Poems
“I have observed in my 30 years in Washington that when a President initiates a major policy speech on a controversial issue while Congress is in recess, it usually is because what he is advocating is indefensible and that he is seeking to minimize criticism.”
“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.
[Letter to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814]”
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson
“I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”
“I have observed several hundred salespeople who were taught to use deceptive practices like 'bait and switch' and encouraged to play negotiation games with customers. They were so stressed by this behavior that they suffered from a high incidence of alcohol and substance abuse, divorce, job-jumping, and low productivity. In the same industry, I have observed countless people who had been taught to sell with high integrity. Ironically, their customer satisfaction, profit margins, and salesperson retention were significantly higher.”
Source: Integrity Selling for the 21st Century: How to Sell the Way People Want to Buy
“I have observed that almost all those whose labour lies in the field, and who go down to their business in the green meadows, admit the animal world to a share in the faculty of reason. It is the cabinet makers who construct a universe of automatons.”
“I have observed that as long as one lives and bestirs himself, he can always find food and raiment, though it may not be of the choicest description.”
“I have observed that baseball is not unlike war, and when you get right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.”
“I have observed that in most of badluck cases, word “luck” is equal to ‘’effort’’.”
“I have observed that in process of becoming ultra rich & famous individual, most of them at later years in life dies of emotional poverty.”
“I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.”
“I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”
Source: Autobiography
“I have observed that radical faith is so convicting to doubters, the lukewarm, the halfhearted and the religious who have re-scripted the Bible in a way that requires them to live only in the realm of reason. The truth is, you have to either be the next one out of the boat or find some spiritual excuse to relieve your cowardliness.”
Source: Spiritual Intelligence: The Art of Thinking Like God
“I have observed that religious practice is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness itself. I have also suggested that, whether a person practices religion or not, the spiritual qualities of love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, humility and so on are indispensable.”
“I have observed that the opportunities to chew on failure are as myriad as fork designs. In each there is a little death, and the first response to such a death is usually anger.”
Source: The Museum of Modern Love
“I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra”
“I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.”
“I have observed that vulgar readers almost always lose their veneration for the writings of the genius with whom they have had personal intercourse.”
Source: Letters on the Character and Poetical Genius of Lord Byron
“I have observed that whenever you try to hit somebody, there is a tendency for them to try to hit you back.”
“I have observed that you treat a man as an old garment to be taken apart and stitched again. Perhaps you could think of him as good cloth, rich fabric that wants only to be embroidered upon. And perhaps, if you will do that, you will see that you love Tailor yourself.”
Source: Keturah and Lord Death
“I have observed that, generally speaking, network sports announcers did not tend to live to a ripe old age. On the other hand, I had noticed that baseball announcers seemed to go right on forever. Bob Elson has been calling balls and strikes since the beginning of time. Harry Caray must have started with Abner Doubleday, and was still going strong.”
Source: Hello everybody, I'm Lindsey Nelson
“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.”
Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom.”
Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
“I have observed, on board a steamer, how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation, because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility, and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.”
Source: Letters to a Friend
“I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.”
“I have obsessed about my weight in some sort of way all my life. I used to write in my journal what I weighed every day.”
“I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist raised communist educated communist nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.”
“I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.”
Source: The Letters of E. B. White
“I have occasionally railed against the quantity of objects in this house, and I know from his reaction that Edward’s perception of them is different from mine. For him, the house represents continuity and tradition, security and roots. If he were turned out of the place tomorrow, even if he were left with a livelihood and somewhere else to live, he would be shivering like a man whose coat has been ripped off his back in a storm.”
“I have occasionally thought that some [TV] hosts have needed treatment, and some of these hosts have even admitted they could benefit from therapy. Having said that, I think most people can benefit from treatment. Those who need it and refuse to get it generally have the most "issues.”
“I have OCD mixed with ADD, you try living with that. Its complicated.”
“I have OCD, which is not fun. I have to be incredibly tidy and organized or it messes with my mind and switches off on me.”
“I have odd thumbs that are extremely flexible. I can bend them quite far down the back side of my hand, basically the opposite side you'd even try to attempt bending your thumb. Because of that, I'm a very good thumb wrestler.”
“I have odometer readings, kids; all sorts of measurements of what I've been doing for the last 20 years. I get it. I get that it was a while ago.”
“I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercise.”
Source: Hamlet
“I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.”
“I have offered
many of my selves to you
to feel a single you.”
Source: शून्य मुटुको धड्कनभित्र [Shoonya Mutuku Dhadkanbhitra]
“I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.”
“I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.”
“I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magick of numbers.”
“I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”
Source: Minority Report
“I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth - matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.”
Source: The American Commonwealth
“I have often asked myself if I would have worked as hard if I was as ill as Steve Jobs. My answer is that my wife most likely would not have let me work, and I would have stayed home. But I am not Steve Jobs.”
“I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated.”
Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“I have often been accused of being obtuse, however one must dig well below the top-soil to get my drift".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]”
Source: The Journey Is the Destination: A Book of Quotes With Commentaries
“I have often been accused of putting my foot in my mouth, but I will never put my hand in your pockets”
“I have often been afraid, but I would not give in to it. I made myself act as though I was not afraid and gradually my fear disappeared.”