I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.”
Source: The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel
“I have often noticed that spoiled, petted children, usually have very little love for their parents, or indeed for any one but themselves.”
Source: Elsie Dinsmore
“I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.”
Source: A gesture of belonging: letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979
“I have often noticed that the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent, India and Pakistan, attribute to Kashmiris an inferior intellect, a lineage, and a mystique that has allowed the dominant regime to manipulate the Kashmiri "Other" as a stereotypical and predictable entity.”
“I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.”
Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.”
Source: Lolita
“I have often noticed that when Fate has a phenomenal run of ill luck in store for you, she begins by dropping a rare piece of good fortune into your lap, thereby enhancing the artistic effect of the sequel.”
Source: Impressions that remained
“I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, "Oh, I see. That's how it must be." This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.”
“I have often observ'd the loudest Laughers to be the dullest Fellows in the Company.”
Source: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy
“I have often observed that extremely violent noise and activity go with good-fellowship and heightened spirits.”
Source: The Letter of Marque (Vol. Book 12) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
“I have often observed that resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our eyes.”
“I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, 'Come and take my photograph.' So I do, regardless of how I feel.”
“I have often pointed out to students that the Jim Crow order had a specific and relatively brief life span. It was not completely consolidated until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. All of my grandparents were fully sentient and aware of their social environments, if not full adults, before the order's features took definite shape and assumed the form of normal politics and everyday life. And during the roughly three decades or so between the regime's consolidation and its slow, painful unraveling, the system was placed under considerable strain and reorganized internally by the Great Migration of black people out of the South or to cities within it, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the emergence of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the war. And in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints–from the struggle over its imposition to its eventual defeat.”
Source: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
“I have often prayed for you like this Let me have her”
“I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.”
“I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.”
“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“I have often reflected within myself on this unaccountable humor in womankind of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial, and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition.”
Source: The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison
“I have often regretted having spoken, never having kept silent.”
“I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.”
“I have often regretted what I have eaten, but never what I have drunk.”
“I have often remarked that it is hardest of all to live with people who are untruthful and insincere.”
“I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having been silent.”
“I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.”
“I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.”
“I have often said China is not lacking in material resources. The question is whether we can make full and good use of them.”
“I have often said I don’t dream. I realize that everyone dreams, but I don’t remember my dreams!”
Source: WOMEN LIKE ME COMMUNITY: DREAMS THAT SPEAK: THE POWER OF WOMEN’S DREAMS
“I have often said in answer to inquiries as to how I got away with kidding some of our public men, that it was because I liked all of them personally, and that if there was no malice in your heart there could be none in your "Gags", and I have always said I never met a man I dident like.”
Source: The Will Rogers scrapbook
“I have often said one of the greatest secrets of missionary work is work! If a missionary works, he will get the Spirit; if he gets the Spirit, he will teach by the Spirit; and if he teaches by the Spirit, he will touch the hearts of the people and he will be happy. There will be no homesickness, no worrying about families, for all time and talents and interests are centered on the work of the ministry. Work, work, work-there is no satisfactory substitute, especially in missionary work.”
Source: The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson
“I have often said one of the reasons more blacks don't support Republicans is because they don't trust the GOP establishment.”
“I have often said that a person who wishes to begin a good life should be like one who draws a circle. Let him or her get the center in the right place and keep it so and the circumference will be good.”
“I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.”
“I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes.”
“I have often said that it doesn't matter to me if a student tells me he is a leader of the left, unless he is a good student. We need good students.”
“I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty. That the reasons flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.”
Source: Last flight
“I have often said that we have two UNs; the UN that is a Secretariat, that implements the mandates handed over to it by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and the UN that is the member states who sit in the Council, take the decisions, hand over the mandates, or take decisions in the General Assembly.”
“I have often said to my Jewish friends: "Please just remember where you come from. Remember Yahweh, who said to the Israelites, 'Treat the alien well with justice.'" Almost all of the passion that we have has come from the inspiration that we have got from the Jewish Scriptures.”
“I have often said to the orchestra, especially to the younger players, 'Do your best, and love what you are doing, because you are allowed to do this thing.' By this I mean, they can do what millions of people cannot do. Many people cannot think of playing music or listening to it until six o'clock in the evening. To be involved professionally in a thing as creative as this is a great privilege and we have a duty to make it in such a way that we can help bring pleasure and a sense of fulfillment to those who are not so fortunate.”
“I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel - a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.”
“I have often seen a cat without a grin - but a grin without a cat - remember the cat kept appearing and disappearing slowly bit by bit.”
“I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.”
“I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.”
“I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.”
“I have often seen this about Life…that when a door closes on you, when people reject you, when what you desperately want does not come to you despite your best efforts and prayers…all this happens only because you are meant to be walking through a different door, you are meant to be meeting other people and only because it is ordained that you receive something else, which you have not even imagined…that which is truly meant for you. So, don’t grieve when you don’t get what you want; what you want is immaterial…What Life believes you need is what you eventually, always, get!”
“I have often spoken of integrity as the most important of these values, realizing that integrity – and personal integrity, at that – is being honest to yourself. If you are always honest to yourself, it does not take much effort in always being honest with others.”
“I have often started off on a walk in the state called mad-mad in the sense of sore-headed, or mad with tedium or confusion; I have set forth dull, null and even thoroughly discouraged. But I never came back in such a frame of mind, and I never met a human being whose humor was not the better for a walk.”
“I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”
Source: Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, written by himself
“I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.”
“I have often suspected that Loki, the trickster god, invented Christianity because it has his wicked stench all over it. I can imagine the gods sitting in Asgard one night, all of them bored and probably drunk, and Loki amuses them with a typical piece of his nonsense, "Let’s invent a carpenter," he suggests, "and tell the fools that he was the son of the only god, that he died and came back to life, that he cured blindness with lumps of clay, and that he walked on water!" Who would believe that nonsense? But the trouble with Loki is that he always takes his jests too far.”