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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I saw something in the store the other day that I don't understand: that peanut butter and jelly in the same jar. Is there a point to that? I mean, I'm lazy-but I wanna meet the guy who needs that. Some guy going, "You know, I could go for a sandwich-but, uh, I'm not gonna open two jars. I can't be opening and closing all kinds of jars. Cleaning, who knows how many knives!?"”

“I saw that, although they were at the mercy of the sweltering heat, or the pains of aging or poverty, they could tolerate these because their faith gave them the hope of being united in spirit with a supernatural presence. I still denied that presence. My denial, I was realizing, was my armor; it allowed me to deflect a barrage of difficult questions. But it didn't answer those questions. It protected me from charlatans, yes, but it didn't fill my emptiness or give me direction. Doubt served a purpose, but it also prevented me from trusting anyone or anything. Without trust, how could I ever be happy?”

“I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.”

“I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point - namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation. I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.”

“I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.”

“I saw that I had forgotten how beautiful the drive to Thunder Bay was; the towering sighing groves of fragrant Norway pines, the broad expanses of clean white sand, the sea gulls, always the endlessly wheeling sea gulls; an occasional bald eagle seeming bent on soaring straight up to heaven; the intermittent craggy and pine-clad granite or sandstone hills, sometimes rising gauntly to the dignity of small mountains, then again, sudden stretches of sand or more majestic Norway pines -- and always, of course, the vast glittering heaving lake, the world's largest inland sea, as treacherous and deceitful as a spurned woman, either caressing or raging at the shore, more often turbulent than not, but today on its best company manners, presenting the falsely placid aspect of a mill pond.”

“I saw that on Small Business Saturday, the president went shopping at a bookstore and bought 17 books, including "The Laughing Monsters," "Being Mortal," and "Heart of Darkness." Or as the cashier put it, "You OK, man? Maybe a little 'Chicken Soup for the Presidential Soul?'”

“I saw that pain and disease existed and at the same time that they were void of sense and meaning. Among the men of the rabble I had become a creature of a strange, unknown race, so much so that they had forgotten that I had once been part of their world. I had the dreadful sensation that I was not really alive or wholly dead. I was a living corpse, unrelated to the world of living people and at the same time deprived of the oblivion and peace of death.”

“I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.”