I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It is difficult to attack me directly on religion because I never speak of it. Formally I am a strict observer of decorum and in public affairs it is my principle to uphold religion.”
“It is difficult to be a good noncommissioned officer. If it had been easy, they would have given it to the officer corps.”
“It is difficult to be emphatic when no one is emphatic on the other side.”
Source: My Summer in a Garden
“It is difficult to be enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was difficult for him to be enthusiastic about anything.
His motto is nil admirari - to admire or marvel at nothing.”
Source: The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
“It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.”
Source: Leacock on Life
“It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.”
Source: The Children of Men
“It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.”
Source: Hawaii: A Novel
“It is difficult. To be one who endures.”
“It is difficult to be patient but to waste the rewards of patience is worse.”
“It is difficult to be sure of our friends, but it is possible to be certain of our loyalty to them.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion
“It is difficult to be yourself on court, as you become very involved in the match and very focused.”
“It is difficult to believe in a religion that places such a high premium on chastity and virginity.”
“It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.”
“It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot.”
“It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.”
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
“It is difficult to call myself a writer, even when I stand at a podium to receive a prize, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer—I am merely a word criminal.”
“It is difficult to conceive any situation more painful than to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption.”
“It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.”
Source: The Child and the Curriculum: Including the School and Society
“It is difficult to create a budget for life when we all cash out the same. Corpses have no currency." -The Years Before My Suicide”
“It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.”
Source: Works
“It is difficult to define love; all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love-Plus many mysteries.”
“It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine.”
“It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves”
“It is difficult to describe the peace that comes with giving yourself permission to know what you know. To have hard, complicated realities staring at you and be able to raise your head and look back at them with a steady gaze, scared maybe, grieved perhaps, but straight on and unwavering”
“It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”
Source: City: Rediscovering the Center
“It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.”
“It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.”
“It is difficult to discuss... history.. it is more difficult to talk about today.. simple things…”
“It is... difficult to dissociate Jamie's preoccupation with questions of land access and ownership from the fact that she is writing out of a country with one of the most unequal distributions of land ownership in Europe. Jamie has referred to 'the scandalous business of land ownership, especially in Scotland, where 80% of the land is owned by 10% of the people, and issues related to these imbalances often surface in her work. In a recent interview, Jamie remarked: 'I feel I might be striking a tiny blow: by getting out into thse places, and developing a language and a way of seeing that is not theirs but ours... It's the simplest act of resistance and renewal.”
Source: Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New
“It is difficult to distinguish deduction from what in other circumstances is called problem-solving. And concept learning, inference, and reasoning by analogy are all instances of inductive reasoning. (Detectives typically induce, rather than deduce.) None of these things can be done separately from each other, or from anything else. They are pseudo-categories.”
Source: To Think: In Language, Learning and Education
“It is difficult to distinguish where the feminine ends and nature begins.”
“It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language.”
“It is difficult to divest one's self of vanity; because impossible to divest one's self of self-love.”
Source: The Letters of Horace Walpole: Earl of Orford
“It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.”
Source: Amarance
“It is difficult to esteem a man as highly as he would wish.”
“It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.”
Source: A Chapter on Street Nuisances. [Extracted from
“It is difficult to experience moments of happiness if we are not aware of what it is we genuinely love.”
“It is difficult to explain to children in the "overdeveloped" nations that not all children in the world have such beautiful and nourishing food. Awareness of this fact alone can help us overcome many of our own psychological pains. Eventually our contemplation can help us see how to assist those who need our help so much.”
“It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.”
Source: Conversations with Chinua Achebe
“it is difficult to fault those attempting to keep up in the rat race, especially if it's through a maze which they enjoy running. (*Hacking Life*, p. 61)”
“It is difficult to feel accomplished when you're not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something 'for your own good' is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.”
Source: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
“It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?”
“It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing?”
“It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.”
“It is difficult to find anything more healthy to drink than good cold water, such as flows down to us from springs and snows of our mountains. This is the beverage we should drink. It should be our drink at all times.”
“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.”
Source: 101 Facts of life
“It is difficult to fly without wings.”
“It is difficult to free fools from chains they revere.”
Source: Beautiful Creatures
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”