I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.”
“Is it not better to live in dreams and realize it than to live in reality and forget to dream?”
“Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?”
Source: Complete Essays
“Is it not by learning to read the book of nature with the eyes of faith that we come to recognize the drop of divinity that resides in our own souls though hidden, master? In the end is this not faith; to seek the light that takes us further, the light of Christ that brings that to which reason and knowledge alone can never raise itself? This is truth!”
Source: Temple of the Grail
“Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?”
Source: An autobiography
“Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.”
Source: Glare
“Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil”
“Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?”
Source: Letters of Delmore Schwartz
“Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?”
Source: The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké
“Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?”
Source: We
“Is it not common to say to a child, 'Put your finger in that candle, can you bear it even for one minute?' How then will you bear Hell-fire? Surely it would be torment enough to have the flesh burnt off from only one finger; what then will it be to have the whole body plunged into a lake of fire, burning with brimstone?”
Source: Sermons on Several Occasions
“Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?”
Source: Animal Farm
“Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it”
Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“Is it not dangerous to have students study together for years, copying the same models and approximately the same path?”
“Is it not demonstrated that a true flying machine, self-raising, self-sustaining, self-propelling, is physically impossible?”
“Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun Glorious? The Earth fruitful? The Air Pleasant? The Sea Profitable? And the Giver bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory.”
Source: Centuries of Meditations
“Is it not eminently just that I should give myself entirely and without reserve to Him Who drew me out of nothing, and Who at every moment of my life maintains the existence He has given me; Whom I have received all and from Whom I expect all, and without Whom I can never be happy?”
“Is it not enough that 'things are cruel and blind'? Must we also be cruel and blind?”
Source: Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre -- Anarchist, Feminist, Genius
“Is it not enough that all the world is against us, but we must also be against one another? O happy days of persecution, which drove us together in love, whom the sunshine of liberty and prosperity crumbles into dust by our contentions!”
Source: The saints' everlasting rest; The divine life; and Dying thoughts; also, A call to the unconverted; and Now or never. Carefully revised
“Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice?”
Source: Annotated The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Or Gustavus Vassa, The African with English Grammar Exercises: by Olaudah Equiano (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)
“Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.”
“Is it not enough to dip your tongue into my soul and write poetry?”
“Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?”
Source: Complete Essays
“Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of John Dryden (Illustrated)
“Is it not excessively ridiculous to seek the good opinion of those whom you would never wish to be like?”
“Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?”
Source: EPZ Thousand Plateaus
“Is it not gain to have diminished the faith that it was the duty of the wretched and the miserable to be content with the lot in life which providence had awarded them?”
Source: Humanity's Gain from Unbelief
“Is it not grotesque when the representatives of an antiquated myth-sorcery, who believes in trinity, angels, devils, hell, virgin-birth, bodily Ascension, making of water into wine, wine to blood, - when they want to impress us with their "science"?”
“Is it not High Time for the People of this Country explicitly to declare, whether they will be Freemen or Slaves? It is an important Question which ought to be decided. It concerns us more than any Thing in this Life. The Salvation of our Souls is interested in the Event: For wherever Tyranny is establish'd, Immorality of every Kind comes in like a Torrent. It is in the Interest of Tyrants to reduce the People to Ignorance and Vice.”
“Is it not ignorance that we share? A lie takes two. The truth we find alone.”
“Is it not in accordance with divine order that every mortal is thrown into that situation where his hidden evils can be brought forth to his own view, that he may know them, acknowledge them, struggle against them, and put them away?”
“Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?”
Source: Old and New Church Music (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
“Is it not in the struggle to obtain knowledge that happiness exists? I am very ignorant, consequently the conditions of happiness are mine.”
“Is it not insupportable to be held down to a canter when you long to gallop for miles?”
“Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.”
Source: Pope Joan
“Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, then the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. 'Cogito, ergo Deus est,' argues St. Augustine, 'I think, therefore God is.'”
“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...
Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?”
Source: For the Time Being: Essays
“Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?”
“Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?”
“Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?”
Source: The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Is it not meningitis?”
Source: Louisa May Alcott Premium Edition - 16 Novels in One Volume: Little Women Trilogy & Other Novels (Illustrated): Moods, The Mysterious Key and What It Opened, An Old Fashioned Girl, Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, Behind a Mask, The Abbot's Ghost, A Modern Mephistopheles…
“Is it not monstrous that our seducers should be our accusers?”
Source: Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington
“Is it not obvious that Britain, under the regime of Tony Blair, has ceased to respect the Charter of the United Nations?”
“Is it not obvious that the more complex an economy, the more certainly will governmental control of productive effort exert a retarding influence?”
“Is it not obvious? What is life but a betrayal? We start out young, full of hope. The sun is good, the world awaits us. But every passing year shows how small you are, how insignificant against the power of the seasons. Then you age. Your strength fails and the world laughs at you through the jeers of younger men. And you die. Alone. Unfulfilled. But sometimes . . . sometimes there will come a man who is not insignificant. He can change the world, rob the seasons of their power. He is the sun.”
“Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?”
“Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.”
“Is it not passing brave to be a King and ride in triumph through Persepolis?”
“Is it not possible for us all to realize that the masses will never mount to freedom through murder?”
Source: Collected Works
“Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of the elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control? Only when our prehistoric ancestors developed language would it have been possible to discuss such internal feelings and create a shared religion.”