I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It is quite unacceptable that a member of Dáil Éireann and in particular a Cabinet Minister and Taoiseach, should be supported in his personal lifestyle by gifts made to him personally.”
“It is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man.”
Source: A Light in the Heavens: Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII
“It is quite unsettling looking into someone's eyes, especially when you aren't used to it.”
“It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes.”
“It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.”
“It is quite useless to ask a man to adopt the Christian view of the gospel unless he first has the Christian view of sin.”
Source: God Transcendent
“It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good . Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.”
Source: The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw (Illustrated): Including Renowned Titles like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, The Inca Of Perusalem, Macbeth Skit, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion
“It is quite widely known that I like shoes. This is not something that defines me as either a woman or a politician, but it has come to define me in the eyes of the newspapers. I wore a pair of leopard-print kitten heels to a Conservative Party Conference a few years ago and the papers have continued to focus on my feet ever since.”
“It is quite wrong for party conferences to be used as an excuse for the Commons not to sit. Conferences could be held at weekends.”
“It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.”
Source: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
“It is quite wrong to think of old age as a downward slope. On the contrary, one climbs higher and higher with the ad-vancing years, and that, too with sur-prising strides. Brain-work comes as easily to the old as physical exertion to the child. One is moving, it is true, towards the end of life, but that end is now a goal, and not a reef in which the vessel may be dashed.”
“It is radical for a woman to choose to survive and to choose to eat anything.”
“It is rage, expanding so fast and so hot that it fuels itself beneath your skin. Grief so deep you are only an open wound, only pain. Pain so fresh that the world itself feels like it should be burning.”
Source: Bloodmarked
“It is raining and you can hear the pattern of the drops. You can hear it with your ears, or you can hear it out of that deep silence. If you hear it with complete silence of the mind, then the beauty of it is such that cannot be put into words or onto canvas, because that beauty is something beyond self-expression .”
“It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.”
“It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... spreading DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. ... It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.”
“It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature!”
“It is raining, perhaps clouds voiding their deepest longings! Upon the streams I have drove those paper boats to the farthest. Listening to the lonely drops of rain I am trying in vain to sing melodious, Alas the voice ends deep within! Were you the song within? O my dear, but I know you are silence that sings wordless, a melody hummed nameless!”
Source: The Solitary Shores
“It is rank, wealth, prominence, prestige, fame, and advantage that arouse the will. It is appearances, actions, sexual beauty, conceptual coherence, emotional energies, and intentions that entangle the mind. It is dislikes, desires, joy, anger, sorrow, and
happiness that tie down Virtuosity. It is avoiding, approaching, taking, giving,
understanding, and ability that block the Course. When these twenty-four items do not disrupt you, the mind is no longer pulled off center. Centered, it finds stillness. Still, it finds clarity. Once clear, it becomes empty, and once empty, it is able to “do nothing, and yet leave nothing undone.”
Source: Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries
“It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.”
Source: Letters to a Young Novelist
“It is rare and very inspiring that a head of state would make such an investment of time to write a book like this. It is a fine gift to the judokas of the world as well as to those of Russia...Vladimir Putin Sensei and his co-writers have established themselves as gifted writers and contributors to the judo world.”
“It is rare for even adult children to abandon their mother, regardless of how many times their mother has abandoned them.”
Source: Understanding the Borderline Mother
“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves”
Source: The Crucible
“It is rare for people to say they want to be held accountable, but in reality, everyone wants everyone else to be held accountable.”
“It is rare for someone who is older to be bolder.”
“It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.'”
“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
“It is rare that a legislature reasons. It is too quickly impassioned.”
Source: Napoleon in his own words from the French of Jules Bertaut
“It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.”
“It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely, and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion.”
Source: Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts
“it is rare, though, that a great wrong is committed by one people against another without some among the perpetrators protesting the deed.”
Source: Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
“It is rare to find a business partner who is selfless. If you are lucky it happens once in a lifetime.”
“It is rare to find a man who believes in his own thoughts or speaks that which he is created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own...feel yourself, and be not daunted by things...The light by which we see this world comes out from the soul of the observer.”
“It is rare to find an established community of Christians that encourages radical expressions of following Jesus. The natural conservatism of institutions is deeply rooted in the desire to survive, and that desire colors and limits the way they read the Bible and how they see God functioning in the world.”
Source: Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
“It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour.”
“It is rare to see a rich man religious; for religion preaches restraint, and riches prompt to unlicensed freedom.”
“It is rare, I think, for parents to let their children -- of any age -- grow up and become peers.”
“It is rare, with people who are on television or celebrities or actors - it's rare to go to their house for a party and find they cooked. That's rare. Usually people don't cook for their own parties, and they don't buy their own gifts. There are people that do that, and that is a special thing. Those kind of little human touches are nice.”
“It is rarely [Americans] dine in society, except in taverns and boarding-houses. Then they eat with the greatest possible rapidity, and in total silence.”
Source: Domestic Manners of the Americans
“It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.”
“It is rarely comfortable to talk about climate change. Bringing something difficult up, it feels like somehow by mentioning this I'm kind of causing it, I'm hurting these people. But you're not hurting these people; climate change is hurting these people. You're telling them they're being hurt.”
“It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be 'treated as cattle'.”
“It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.”
Source: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (British Classics Series): Historical Romance Novel
“It is rarely the food that truly makes a meal, but the people we share it with. A family spaghetti recipe passed down from your grandma. The smell of dumplings clinging to a sweater you haven't washed in years. A cardboard pizza across a yellow table. A friend, lost in a memory, but alive in the taste of a half-burnt brownie.
Love in a lemon pie.”
Source: The Seven Year Slip
“It is rarer to be genuinely kind to the rich than to the poor — because your generosity has to survive without support from feelings of superiority.”
“It is rash to condemn where you are ignorant.”
“It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.”
Source: The Works of George Santayana: Dialogues in limbo. Platonism and the spiritual life. A long way round to Nirvana. The prestige of the infinite. Ultimate religion
“It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.”
“It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Illustrated)
“It is rather as if some strange spirit had taken on the guise of an elderly professor. The body may be pacing this shabby little suburban room, but the mind is far away, roaming the plains and mountains of Middle-Earth.”
Source: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography