I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
“It is one of the ironies of biographical art that some details are more relevant than others, and many details have no relevance at all.”
“It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.”
Source: Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?
“It is one of the ironies of religious history that many mortals err in their understanding of the nature of God and end up rejecting not the real God but their own erroneous and stereotypical image of God. Frequently this is because they have thought of God solely in terms of thunderings at Sinai without pondering substance. . . .”
“It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.”
“It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform”
“It is one of the ironies of woman’s life in that she tends to tango her reflexes with the nuances of male proclivities. It is thus, woman’s true feelings get camouflaged in her lullabies of compliance to let her man sink into the slumber of complacency.”
Source: Benign Flame: Saga of Love
“It is one of the issues that will have to be worked through however let me make the point and I think anyone would accept that if you set it up properly, not only will you get better environmental outcomes, you have a chance to create more wealth with the available resource.”
“It is one of the main teachings of the profound traditional wisdom of India, that the Primordial Mother is the origin of all things and verything tends to flow naturally back towards her.”
“It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.”
Source: Arrowsmith: Elmer Gantry ; Dodsworth
“It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.”
Source: Alone
“It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections”
Source: Modern times: the world from the twenties to the nineties
“It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.”
“It is one of the maxims of the civil law, that definitions are hazardous.”
Source: The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Together with his life, and notes on his Lives of the poets, by Sir John Hawkins, Knt. In eleven volumes ...
“It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.”
“It is one of the misfortunes of our political system that parties are formed more with reference to controversies that are gone by than to the controversies which these parties have actually to decide.”
“It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.”
“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.”
“It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.”
“It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.”
Source: Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization
“It is one of the most discouraging experiences I have ever had, not forgetting the time when I winked at the Queen Mother in London once.”
Source: The Athletic Benchley: 105 Exercises from the Detroit Athletic Club News
“It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.”
“It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the "struggle" of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force.”
“It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful places in the world, the history is fascinating, the men are handsome and the whisky is delicious. But don't eat the macaroni pies.”
“It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.”
Source: Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
“It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.”
Source: The Adventures Of Black Girl in Her Search for God
“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.”
“It is one of the oddest things in the world that you can read a page or more and think of something utterly different.”
“It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.”
Source: Aroused by Books
“It is one of the paradoxes of journalism: The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.”
“It is one of the paradoxes of parenting, and often a painful paradox, that even as our children need us for love and trust, they also need us for honest differing. It's not only over limits and rules...[but also] about what we represent in the way of culture, traditions, and values. We owe it to our children to let them know what we believe, and if they differ with us, we owe it to them to be honest adversaries, for it is through this honest confrontation that children can grow into adults who have a firm sense of their place in the sequence of the generations.”
“It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.”
“It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.”
“It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.”
“It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape - between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. We need the field from which the lark rises - bird that is more than itself, that is the voice of the universe: vigorous, godly job. Without the physical world such hope it: hacked off. Is: dried up. Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could open its wings and become buoyant, adventurous, valorous beyond even the plan of nature. Nor could we.”
“It is one of the privileges of the true man of action that, when the critical moment comes, blemishes of character are effaced, while virtues, till then potential merely, are seen in an unexpectedly vivid light.”
Source: Strange Defeat
“It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.”
“It is one of the psychological mistakes that the world makes, to assume that a man whose inclination drives him on to attempt seduction after seduction is a man of more ardent erotic passion than the more constant lover. The very reverse is the case.”
Source: A Glastonbury Romance
“It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.”
“It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.”
Source: Territorial Rights: A Novel
“It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.”
Source: The Power and the Glory
“It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.”
Source: Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
“It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest.”
Source: The worlds of Brutus Hamilton
“It is one of the strictest conditions of initiation that occult knowledge may never be sold or used for gain.”
Source: Psychic self-defense: The Classic Instruction Manual for Protecting Yourself Against Paranormal Attack
“It is one of the striking generalizations of biochemistry—which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical text-books—that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. As far as I am aware the presently accepted set of twenty amino acids was first drawn up by Watson and myself in the summer of 1953 in response to a letter of Gamow's.”
“It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.”
Source: Without Reservations: The Travels Of An Independent Woman
“It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.”
“It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.”
“It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.”
Source: Burmese Days
“It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.”