Quotessence
Home / Quotes / I Quotes

I Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All I Quotes

“in the end, I found that the proportions obtain­ing in Colebrooke (British Orientalist, d. 1837)’s 1818 donation to the India Office Library generally held up. Out of a total of some twenty thousand manuscripts listed in these catalogs on Yoga, Nyaya­ Vaisheshika, and Vedanta philoso­phy, a mere 260 were Yoga Sutra manuscripts (in­cluding commentaries), with only thirty­ five dating from before 1823 ; 513 were manuscripts on Hatha or Tantric Yoga, manuscripts of works attributed to Ya­jnavalkya, or of the Yoga Vasistha; 9,032 were Nyaya manuscripts, and 10,320 were Vedanta manuscripts. (...) What does this quantitative analysis tell us ? For every manuscript on Yoga philosophy proper (excluding Hatha and Tantric Yoga) held in major Indian manu­script libraries and archives, there exist some forty Ve­danta manuscripts and nearly as many Nyaya­ Vaisheshika manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries account for only one­ third of all manuscripts on Yoga philosophy, the other two­ thirds being devoted mainly to Hatha and Tantric Yoga. But it is the figure of 1.27 percent that stands out in highest relief, because it tells us that after the late sixteenth century virtually no one was copying the Yoga Sutra because no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts, and no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts because no one was interested in reading the Yoga Sutra. Some have argued that instruction in the Yoga Sutra was based on rote memorization or chanting : this is the position of Krishnam­acharya’s biographers as well as of a number of critical scholars. But this is pure speculation, undercut by the nineteenth­ century observations of James Ballantyne, Dayananda Saraswati, Rajendralal Mitra, Friedrich Max Müller, and others. There is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sa­cred or secular literatures of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions. Given these data, we may conclude that Cole­brooke’s laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali’s system had become an empty signifier, with no traditional schoolmen to expound or defend it and no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference. The Yoga Sutra had for all intents and purposes been lost until Colebrooke found it.”

“In the end, I listen to my fear. It keeps me awake, resounding through the frantic beating in my breast. It is there in the dry terror in my throat, in the pricking of the rats’ nervous feet in the darkness. Christian has not come home all the night long. I know, for I have lain in this darkness for hours now with my eyes stretched wide, yearning for my son’s return.”

“In the end, I'm not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I have written over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words... truths that rise up without warning, like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear. What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt the monster to the surface, to create a space, where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us. This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect... this is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live.”

“In the end, I realized that the things in life that I valued most—family, friends, integrity—weren't contingent on business outcomes and couldn't be taken away from me no matter what. Framed that way, all the challenges and risks of running a business were imminently more manageable. In that formulation, the riskiest proposition of all is to lose sight of who I was. To betray myself was the only way to truly fail. And for that reason, I left—with nothing but with everything.”

“In the end, I will become the ghost I always feared. When the fire I kindled in my mind reaches my heart, I will start turning everyone I meet to ashes. So, I speak less and less, withdrawing more and more from the outside world. I navigate a realm that seems devoid of other human beings. I have become isolated in my mind, knowing that I will no longer encounter others, even in my thoughts. I love the solitude, so far below, so far away from life...”

“In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.”

“In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot - and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.”

“In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester....Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers....His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be....Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents. "I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967...and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music...I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't possible. [from the London Review of Books for January 2, 2003]”

“In the end it is nothing other than the loving kindness with which the woman cares for her child that makes the difference. Her concern concentrates on one thing just like the Buddhist practice of concentration. She thinks of nothing but her child, which is similar to Buddhist compassion. That must be why, although she created no other causes to bring about it, she was reborn in the Brahma heaven.”