Quotessence
Home / Quotes / I Quotes

I Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All I Quotes

“It is quite likely ... that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure, but if you could travel ... back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.”

“It is quite likely that the modern contrivances for making Sunday-schools amusing have given them a distate for the more solemn services of the sanctuary. If so, the amusement is a sin. The schools should feed the church. Children ought to be led by one into the other, exposed to the preaching of the gospel, taught the ways of God's house, and brought up under its influence, with all its hallowed and elevating influences.”

“It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.”

“It is quite natural, in pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as you become more loving, but not in ways you can exactly predict. What happens is not important as how you react to what happens.”

“It is quite possible that Barabbas was the crucified person. The name Barabbas means Son of the Father. 'Barabbas' (or 'Bar Abbas') is the Hellenized form of the Aramaic name Bar Abba, which means 'son of the father'. And the name 'Jesus' (from the Greek 'Yesous') is the Hellenized form of the Hebrew name Yeshua. Pilate was essentially asking the Jerusalem crowd: Who do you want me to release: Yeshua son of the Father or Yeshua son of the Father whom your followers call Messiah?" The fact that both men had the same name has been covered up by Catholic and Christian churches, but it is obvious that there was a great opportunity for confusion during this highly emotional, chaotic and devised moment.”

“It is quite possible that, even if you set the most relevant, realistic goals, you may not achieve them in the way or the time you wanted to. Life may throw something unexpected in your path, which stops you from achieving what you want, when you want. This is not failure. Feeling like you have failed is bound to lead to low mood, and can often come about if things haven't quite gone according to plan. However, the best thing to do is to draw a mental line under the experience, learn from what has happened and try again. As long as you are still trying, you are working towards your long-term aims; and as long as you are doing that, you are never truly failing.”

“It is quite possible that we will soon come to live under some sort of global despotism, enlightened or not. This is not a nice prospect. And there is only one way of avoiding that this happens: to establish a global democracy. And it is not too late to strive for such a democracy, of a straightforward populist nature, where people on the globe elect a world parliament, which in turn elects a world government.”

“It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself, for we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being, is to slight those divine powers and thus to harm not only that Being, but with Him, the whole world.”

“It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship.”

“It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country”

“It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.”

“It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.”