I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”
Source: The collected works of Abraham Lincoln
“I confess, I have setbacks like anyone. But they don’t cause distress or coalesce in a mess for I’ve learned to step back, to reflect and assess where I’m at and enact a simple plan of attack — to press forward, progress; not digress, not give up nor express my despair but address what I can, my mistakes and my faults, with a head-on assault. For I’m blessed with my faith and belief and a chest that encases a heart that does not know the meaning of “quit" or “give up" or “there there” or “oh well”, “never-mind” or “bad luck” or “just try something else”, no. Me and myself, my reflection and I, we are not of that ilk, we aren’t ones to comply. We aren’t ones to conform or accept that the norm is a one-size-fits-all way to simply exist for we strive to be different, incredible, unique. Not irrelevant, invisible, insignificant or meek. We strive to resist and we fight to excel, so setbacks to us are a thing to be quashed, to be quelled, to be squished, to be left in our wake as we go on our way, as we sail right on by to impossible ends, to what few dare to try. This is why – this is why – as my reflection attests, there is no time to rest. The struggle is unending … but I will give it my best.”
“I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.”
Source: Oliver Twist
“I confess, I hope she does not hurry. It is good to be alone in the snow.”
Source: Dark Age
“I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a little feast.”
Source: The Poems of Abraham Cowley
“I confess... I'm always secretly amused by people who play 'hard to get,' when they're already so hard to want.”
“I confess I meant to grow
wings and lose my mind
I confess that I've
forgotten what for
Why wings and a lost mind”
“I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.”
“I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.”
Source: The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov: Novellas, Short Stories, Plays, Letters & Diary: Three Sisters, Seagull , The Shooting Party, Uncle Vanya, Cherry Orchard, Chameleon, Tripping Tongue, On The Road, Vanka, Ward No. Six, Swedish Match, Nightmare, Bear, Reluctant Hero, Joy…
“I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.”
“I confess... I've always been secretly amused by people who play 'hard to get,' when they're already so hard to want.”
“I confess I've never felt like a passenger.”
“I confess... if I typo a Facebook post I will edit it. I know it's only Facebook but it's an editing sickness.”
“I confess it is beyond our power to awaken the heart, but ordinarily this way does good.”
“I confess it, I love the camera. When it's not on me, I'm not quite alive.”
“I confess my belief in the common man.... The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.... The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being struck and what blood is being drawn.”
Source: The New Freedom A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People
“I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.”
“I confess myself the greatest coward in the world, for I dare not do an ill thing.”
Source: Plutarch's Morals
“I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.”
“I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.”
Source: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (movie tie-in)
“I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, for a multitude of such theorems can easily be set up, which one could neither prove nor disprove. But I have been stimulated by it to bring our again several old ideas for a great extension of the theory of numbers. Of course, this theory belongs to the things where one cannot predict to what extent one will succeed in reaching obscurely hovering distant goals. A happy star must also rule, and my situation and so manifold distracting affairs of course do not permit me to pursue such meditations as in the happy years 1796-1798 when I created the principal topics of my Disquisitiones arithmeticae. But I am convinced that if good fortune should do more than I expect, and make me successful in some advances in that theory, even the Fermat theorem will appear in it only as one of the least interesting corollaries.
{In reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. The hope Gauss expressed for his success was never realised.}”
“I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.”
“I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist.”
Source: Speeches on Questions of Public Policy
“I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings”
Source: John Stuart Mill's Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments
“I confess that I am now suspicious of nearly every attempt to code anger as unhealthy, no matter how well meaning or persuasive the source. I believe Stanton was correct: what is bad for women, when it comes to anger, are the messages that cause us to bottle it up, let it fester, keep it silent, feel shame, and isolation for ever having felt it or re-channel it in inappropriate directions. What is good for us is opening our mouths and letting it out, permitting ourselves to feel it and say it and think it and act on it and integrate it into our lives, just as we integrate joy and sadness and worry and optimism.”
Source: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
“I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.”
“I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.”
Source: Critical Writings
“I confess that I felt something closer to exaltation than fear. Something inexplicable was happening. Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science. I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of séance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis – the God of Abraham.”
“I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”
Source: The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England: A New Edition:
“I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.”
Source: Selected Non-fictions
“I confess that I love him, I rejoice that I love him, I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth that gave him to me. The exultation floods me.”
Source: Selected Letters
“I confess that I should feel a bit afraid of asking Sunday who he really is.”
“Why,” asked the Secretary, “for fear of bombs?”
“No,” said the Professor, “for fear he might tell me.”
“I confess that I sometimes felt like I was being launched into the endless expanses of space alone...But from the moment I had voiced my trans identity that first night, every step I took felt like coming home. Every step felt like healing, aching and uncomfortable as it began, but slowly hinting at a kind of relief, a feeling of rightness I’d never known before. I was shedding my skin like a snake. I knew it as soon as the itch began. I can only describe how I knew it as the unyielding certainty of instinct.”
Source: Genderbound: An Odyssey From Female to Male
“I confess that my stomach does not take to this style of cooking. I cannot accept calves sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce, nor can I eat mince consisting of turkey, hare, and rabbit, which they try to persuade me comes from a single animal... As for the cooks, I really cannot be expected to put up with this ham essence, nor the excessive quantity of morels and other mushrooms, pepper, and nutmeg with which they disguise perfectly good food.”
“I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.”
“I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.”
“I confess that there is nothing to teach: no religion, no science, no writings which will lead your mind back to Spirit. Today I speak this way, tomorrow that, but always the Path is beyond words and beyond mind.”
“I confess that when I first read that smog is particularly hazardous to children, senior citizens, and physically active people, for a brief moment I thought, “I’m in the clear for at least 10 more years.””
“I confess to a rare problem - gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me - but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.”
“I confess to being a frustrated musician.”
“I confess to being something of a philosophical butterfly. The world is full of so many interesting questions, and although my greatest passion is for some form of applied ethics, that leaves me with oodles of possibilities, many of which I have never had the time or opportunity to explore in great depth.”
“I confess to considerable doubts about the eventual stability of democracy, unless buttressed by constitutional safeguards and a general climate of opinion which thoroughly understands the case for liberty in general”
“I confess to feeling continued ambivalence about political life, aware of its shortcomings and disappointments, but drawn back to it again and again because of its infinite promise. Justice can triumph, wrongs can be righted, and pain can be alleviated, if the right fix is found. The optimistic illusion that one can change the world is difficult to resist, especially when from time to time that illusion is sustained by even a hint of reality. Change does happen in the political process.”
“I confess to getting quickly bored by one style of expression, and I like to experiment with all different sorts of modes. I rebel against familiar tools.”
“I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour's peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people, should be alive, when you--”
Source: The Friend
“I confess to the trees, priests of dreams.”
Source: Cocaine Masks
“I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.”
Source: Dreams From My Father
“I confess to you guys, I confess to the church, I know I have backed away from certain things because of my arrogance. I thought I could attract more people to Jesus by hiding certain things about him.”
“I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars - and, of course, the planets.”
Source: Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets
“I confess, I do not believe in time.”
Source: The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated