I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy . . . great improvement . . . were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.”
“It is impossible to realize our goals while discriminating against half the human race. As study after study has taught us, there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.”
“It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason, as reason is to religion.”
Source: Maxims of Washington: Political, Social, Moral, and Religious
“It is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.”
Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“It is impossible to reign innocently.”
“It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.”
“It is impossible to repeat in one period what was done in another.The pointof view isnotthesame, anymorethan are the tools, the ideals, the needs, or the painters' techniques.”
“It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.”
Source: The Mandelbaum Gate: A Novel
“It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.”
“It is impossible to restore the sustainable societies of indigenous and aboriginal peoples. But the values they embodied - careful stewardship of the earth, modest use of its riches, safeguarding the future of the generations to come, restraint and as high a degree of self-provisioning as possible - can reanimate ancient and still unrealized dreams of a secure sustenence for all.”
“It is impossible to rise to freedom, from the midst of corruptions, without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease. We are in want of a terrible political fever, to carry off our foul humors.”
“It is impossible to satisfy self. Self always wants more and more. It is an ugly monster that will devour you if you don't devour it. Stop feeding it an watch the pressure be released. Self deprivation is much more fulfilling than self gratification. Who Knew?”
“It is impossible to save one's soul without devotion to Mary and without her protection.”
“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.”
Source: Thirty-two Stories
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”
Source: The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems
“It is impossible to say whether an asset class valuation is cheap or expensive in isolation. The valuation of an asset is relative to the valuations of all other assets.”
“It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.”
Source: Later Novels and Stories: The Château / So Long, See You Tomorrow / Stories and Improvisations 1957–1999
“It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away.”
Source: Little Star: A Novel
“It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...
If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...
Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)”
Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
“It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.”
“It is impossible to separate:
heat and light,
warmth and fire,
joy and laughter,
bliss and contentment,
pleasure and elation,
euphoria and excitement,
faith and certainty,
pride and destruction,
hope and anticipation,
desire and expection,
love and affection,
passion and devotion,
misery and hatred,
temper and violence,
rage and resentment,
lust and infatuation,
sentiment and opinion,
zeal and ambition,
confidence and conviction,
anger and bitterness,
loyalty and friendship,
joy and laughter,
peace and calmness,
patience and composure,
truth and virtue,
courage and fortitude,
mercy and charity,
service and honor,
need and desire,
life and activity,
being and reality,
and time and eternity.”
“It is impossible to separate the art of living from the art of dying, because to be living is to be dying.”
“It is impossible to separate works from faith- yea, just as impossible as to separate burning and shining from fire.”
“It is impossible to serve God without serving one another.”
“It is impossible to shame a woman who has made God the ultimate source of her sensuality.”
“It is impossible to solve health problems of millions of people with the help of pills. People need to put it into practice, have passion for it; healthy lifestyle, fitness and sports should become fashionable.”
“It is impossible to solve significant problems using the same knowledge that created them.”
“It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.”
Source: Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography
“It is impossible to stand upright when one plants his roots in the shifting sands of popular opinion and approval.”
“It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me.”
“It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.”
“It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.”
“It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.”
“It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.”
“It is impossible to swear an oath to the German Basic Law without realizing that our constitution is among the most liberal constitutions in the world. As the head of government in such a country, I would stand up to all those who call into question this free, open and tolerant model of society.”
“It is impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identities that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it.”
Source: Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage
“It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.”
Source: Pierre or The Ambiguities: Works of Melville
“It is impossible to tell how much public money they [the cadres] have spent on dining, money wrung from the blood and sweat of hard-working peasants. According to figures released by the National Statistics Bureau, the yearly spending on dining at public expense in urban and rural areas is somewhere between eight hundred million and one billion yuan, enough to host four Olympic Games, to build two dams like the Three Gorges, or wipe out the disgrace of the widespread phenomenon of children being kept out of school because there are insufficient funds in the education budget.”
“It is impossible to tell where the law stops and justice begins.”
“It is impossible to tell whether prohibition is a good thing or a bad thing. It has never been enforced in this country.”
“It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.”
Source: The works of John Ruskin
“It is impossible to think about the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is impossible for a bird to fly on only one wing.”
“It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.”
Source: Prejudices: Third Series
“It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it”
“It is impossible to think of France except in terms of individuals.”
“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”
“It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.”
Source: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
“It is impossible to totally love or hate Jews. Simply because one of them, Jesus the Christ, became a god to the Gentiles and so many nations.”
“It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?”
“It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.”
Source: New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)