I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.”
“Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.”
“Imaginative writings can lead to action, but they do not have to. They belong to the realm of fine art.
A work of fine art is "fine" not because it is "refined," but because it is an end (finis, Latin, means end) in itself. It does not move toward some result beyond itself. It is, as Emerson said of beauty, its own excuse for being.”
“Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.”
“Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels.”
Source: Chapman
“Imaginatively in a pictorial sense I was airborne.”
“Imagine (if you dare) a whimsical marriage of Lord Dunsany and S.J. Perelman, and you have something approaching the tales of Rhys Hughes, filled with gaudy colour, slapstick, puns, fantastic creatures, and the occasional unexpected chill. Hughes' world is a magical one - and his language if the most magical thing of all.”
“Imagine - four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt.”
“Imagine ... Imagine no religion.”
“Imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”
“Imagine 4 years.
Four years, two suicides, one death, one rape, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countless drunken antics, pantsings, spilled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars–every day, a turf war–six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out. But everything you do here counts.
High school.”
Source: Cracked Up to Be
“Imagine a bowl. This bowl has been still for a very long time. It is completely full, and it seems like the water that fills it is completely still, totally pure.
Still ... If we were to look into the depths of this water, we would find sediments, solids, everything that was present in this water, that through time settled at the bottom of this bowl like mud.
If one was to take this bowl and hold it over an intense stream of water, it could be quite shocking to see the mud, the solids that have been dormant for so long, to start surfacing. The water we thought was clean is suddenly completely dirty and there are big lumps of dirt ... Suddenly we are faced with that which we thought was gone long ago ...
All we need to do is to not focus on the dirt, but on the pure, clean water (in our case it is really light) that is flowing through us, bringing to surface all that needs to be brought to light, transforming it.
Embrace all parts of you.
They need it.”
“Imagine a carefree caterpillar too afraid of becoming a beautiful butterfly, how tragic life will be”
Source: A Soul Recharged Book of Affirmations and Journal
“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet.”
“Imagine a civilisation that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us, and assist us in our development. The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion.”
“Imagine a community where everyone truly belongs. Housing owners' associations can make this a reality by ensuring that people with disabilities have full access to social and cultural activities within their communities.”
Source: Understanding Accessibility
“Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can't resolve the problem of women's pantyhose. There's no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.”
“Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity, and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses arent socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here - and why we absolutely must.”
“Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only entertainment."”
“Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.
Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.
Now make it the size of a city”
Source: Blindsight
“Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom.”
Source: Inner Revolution
“Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea. Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink. Is the glass part full or part empty? Take another sip. And now?”
“Imagine a dense forest full of tigers and you in a strong steel cage. Knowing that you are well protected by the cage, you watch the tigers fearlessly. Next, you find the tigers in the cage and yourself roaming about in the jungle. Last, the cage disappears and you ride the tigers!”
“Imagine a different world, one in which people do not spend an inordinate amount of energy fuming against their fate each time they make a mistake. ... though we all agree that to err is human, each of us individually believes that he or she is the exception. ... Make a mistake? Not on my watch!”
“Imagine a dolphin dancing in the sky. Let it dance with joy. Think of yourself at the bottom of the ocean watching.”
“Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.”
Source: Murder in the Dark
“Imagine a fellow in manacles: hungry, thirsty, flea-bitten, tormented by his mind in hideous ways. And you (unmanacled, free, comfortable, sane) walk past.
You cannot free him.
But you might comfort him.
I felt a new and powerful truth being beamed directly into me, by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive:
Comfort.
Comfort, for all else is futility.”
Source: Vigil
“Imagine a film such as Inception with an entire cast of black people - do you think it would be successful? Would people watch it? But no one questions the fact that everyone's white. That's what we have to change.”
“Imagine a future where we won't be living in the past. I'd be flipping birds like a chicken breast on a spatula.”
“Imagine a future where you hold no grudges towards anyone. You’re not angry at past lovers, not bitter about failures, not disappointed in your parents. You forgive, send love and move on. You’re free.”
Source: He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth through loss
“Imagine a German as president of the European Commission. If he or she goes to some particular country and says do this or that, it won't be very well received. The president quickly ends up being the evil German. But if the president is elected by and controlled by 700 representatives from all EU countries, that legitimizes him or her in a very different way.”
“Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now with climate change, yet we dither.”
“Imagine a glorious full moon coming over the tops of the spruce, big and yellow, shedding a mysterious light on everything... the moonlight had colour, you could see to paint and be able to appreciate the colour of things.”
“Imagine a great net spread across the universe. Each juncture is a “being,” and if we imagine that consciousness as a drop of dew, we can see that in each shining drop resides the reflection of every other drop on the net.”
Source: Opening the Lotus: A Woman's Guide to Buddhism
“Imagine a guy. He’s a little taller than you, with perfect skin, skin that just screams “touch me!” and dark hair and gorgeous blue eyes and he looks so sweet and he is sweet. And then have him blush a little.”
Source: The Unwritten Rule
“Imagine a history teacher making history.”
“Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.”
Source: Words to Live By: Short Readings of Daily Wisdom
“Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces. There are a million ways in which it can be incomplete but there is only one way in which it is complete.
Your mind thinks that it is a player with the mission to solve the puzzle of universe. The truth is that mind itself is the last piece of the puzzle. Surrender! Dissolve the mind and be one with the rest of the universe.”
“Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism.”
“Imagine a kind of system where you have lightweight electric vehicles relatively small battery capacity, and then picking up charge wherever they park. You never have to worry about filling up your car, never go to the gas station, never plug it in, never do any of these things.”
“Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence.
Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people — when they need to — with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax … everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws … and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up.
Perhaps somebody will wonder if dragons aren’t, after all, fictitious because — despite their size — nobody seems to have actually seen one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It’s contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.”
Source: Book of Pages
“Imagine a legal immigration system that welcomes and celebrates those who come to achieve the American dream.”
“Imagine a legal system in which lawyers were equated with the clients they defended and were condemned for representing controversial or despised clients.”
Source: Letters to a Young Lawer (Easyread Large Edition)
“Imagine a life where threats are minimal and your fear is contained to not dominate your daily experiences in the world. You can have that. You deserve that. And in order to experience that, we have to venture into what might feel like a hostile terrain of rocky
challenges. We are venturing into your chaotic, muddled and beautiful life. The messy and chaotic parts. May you begin with your head held high.”
Source: The Power of Mess: A guide to finding joy and resilience when life feels chaotic
“Imagine a life where you love a partner who loves you unconditionally - a truly beautiful existence.”
“Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.”
“Imagine a limitless expanse of water: above and below, before and behind, right and left, everywhere there is water. In that water is placed a jar filled with water. There is water inside the jar and water outside, but the jar is still there. The 'I' is the jar.”
Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
“Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.”
“Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing when parents make from their children's souls paralytics.”
“Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.”
Source: The Urth of the New Sun: The sequel to 'The Book of the New Sun'