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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”

“If Yui had to describe this feeling, this pain, she would say it was like the stabbing contractions that preceded childbirth, the wonder of the process she had experienced when her daughter was born: closing to open again, contracting to then dilate, clamp and hold, then spread your legs wide and push. A total paradox, essentially, like one of those things you only find when you've stopped looking for it. Like love, true love, or children that won't come.”

“If Zen is approached with the usual mental attitude, it will seem quite incomprehensible. Our average Western intellectuality would consider its paradoxical language simply as a play upon words. Its full significance is revealed only when we approach it in a different manner, making our minds available to the new processes of inner perception which it suggests.”

“If Zen master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.”

“If zero percent of the elites support something, very low chance it's going to pass, if 100% support something, very high chance it's going to pass. Same thing for organized interest groups. But for the average voter, it's a flat line. Which says it doesn't matter whether zero percent of the public believes something or 100% of the average voters believe something - it doesn't affect the probability that that thing will be enacted.”

“If zoos are like arks, then rare animals are like passengers on a voyage of the damned, never to find a port that will let them dock or a land in which they can live in peace. The real solution, of course, is to preserve the wild nature that created these animals and has the power to sustain them. But if it is really true that we are inevitably moving towards a world in which mountain gorillas can survive only in zoos, then we must ask whether it is really better for them to live in artificial environments of our design than not to be born at all.”

“If, after a rigid examination, it be found an imposition, it should be extensively published to the world as such; the evidences and arguments on which the imposture was detected, should be clearly and logically stated, that those who have been sincerely yet unfortunately deceived, may perceive the nature of the deception and be reclaimed, and that those who continue to publish the delusion, may be exposed and silenced.”

“If, anywhere, brethren of a particular religious belief have been excluded from this Degree [18° Knight Rose Croix], it merely shows how gravely the purposes and plan of Masonry may be misunderstood. For whenever the door of any Degree is closed against him who believes in one God and the soul's immortality, on account of the other tenets of his faith, that Degree is Masonry no longer.”

“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”

“If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.”

“If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.”