I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It may be that it is not given to us to know when we are angels. We may only be given to know when others are. This may be one of the reasons we need each other so.”
Source: The Zoo where You're Fed to God: A Novel
“It may be that it is only by the grace of granitization that we have continents to live on.”
Source: The Granite Controversy: Geological Addresses Illustrating the Evolution of a Disputant
“It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein.”
Source: Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe
“It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good, and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.”
Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
“It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.”
“It may be that no life is found, Which only to one engine bound Falls off, but cycles always round.”
Source: Fifty Poems
“It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever…”
“It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God's voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him.”
“It may be that other developers are finding that their games play better on one platform over the other, so they're choosing to migrate to that platform.”
“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.”
“It may be that places exist in order that memory itself has a home.”
“It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
“It may be that poetry’s real beauty and elegance is not its finely-chiseled lines or smoothly-rounded ideological concepts at all. The crown of its significance might be––or possibly should be?––its expansive capacity to embrace with equal passion the deadliest failings and the most splendid victories defining human existence.”
Source: Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
“It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.”
“It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.”
“It may be that Satan has little cause to fear most preaching. Yet past experiences sting him to rally all his infernal army to fight against God's people praying.”
Source: Why Revival Tarries
“It may be that some are unwilling to accept the possibility of conscious thermostats simply because we understand thermostats too well. We know everything about their processing, and there seems no reason to invoke consciousness. But thermostats are really no different from brains here. Even once we understand brain processing perfectly, there will still seem to be no reason to invoke consciousness. The only difference is that right now, what is going on inside a brain is enough of a mystery that one may be tempted to suppose that consciousness is somehow “located” in those brain processes that we do not yet understand. But as I have argued, even coming to understand those processes will not alone bring consciousness into the picture; so here, once again, brains and thermostats are on a par.
One might be bothered by the fact that one could build a thermostat oneself, without putting any consciousness in. But of course the same applies to a brain, at least in principle. When we build a brain (in reproduction and development, say), consciousness conies along for free; the same will go for a thermostat. We should not expect to locate consciousness as a physical component of the system! Some may worry about the fact that a thermostat is not alive; but it is hard to see why that should make a principled difference. A disembodied silicon brain of the sort discussed in the last chapter would arguably fail to qualify as alive, but we have seen that it might be conscious. And if the arguments in the last chapter are right, then the fact that a thermostat is not made up of biological components makes no difference, in principle.”
Source: The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
“It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.”
Source: Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
“It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.”
“It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.”
“It may be that the fear contains information. Something can be interesting if you get to the other side of that fear.”
“It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe... The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”
Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
“It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“It may be that the invention of the aeroplane flying-machine will be deemed to have been of less material value to the world than the discovery of Bessemer and open-hearth steel, or the perfection of the telegraph, or the introduction of new and more scientific methods in the management of our great industrial works. To us, however, the conquest of the air, to use a hackneyed phrase, is a technical triumph so dramatic and so amazing that it overshadows in importance every feat that the inventor has accomplished.”
“It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.”
Source: All the Pretty Horses
“It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.”
Source: Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992
“It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits”
Source: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music: Sixth Edition
“It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.”
Source: The Lantern Bearers
“It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.”
“It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.”
“It may be that the requirement of a preliminary approval by the Grand Jury, of all accusations of a serious nature, justified the boast that a man was presumed to be innocent until he was 'found' guilty; but that presumption certainly ceased to have practical application, so soon as the Grand Jury had returned a 'true bill'.”
Source: A Short History of English Law: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Year 1919
“It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home.”
“It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.”
“It may be that the U.S. stock market starts to rise if people think it's gone far enough.”
“It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.”
“It may be that them whose pleasure brings you into this world owes you a living, but it don't mean the world is responsible.”
“It may be that there are such things as true proofs, but it is not certain.”
Source: Pensées
“It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is you know as Kipling put it. [...] To fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.”
“It may be that there is so much ambiguity and ideology attached to the term 'terrorism' that it is best to avoid its use altogether, as it is likely to be twisted in public discourse to demonise the enemies of the established order, while exempting state violence from legal and moral scrutiny.”
“It may be that there is such a thing as racial memory, and it is supported by the undeniable observation that the goblins will get you if you don't watch out.”
“It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.”
“It may be that these loan arrangements conform to the letter of the law, but they do not conform to the spirit of the law and to the principle of transparency on which it is based.”
“It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.”
“It may be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.”
Source: Amid these storms: thoughts and adventures
“It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us-the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star-we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child.”
Source: Mary Poppins: 80th Anniversary Collection
“It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.”
Source: Mein Kampf
“It may be that true happiness lies in the conviction that one has irremediably lost happiness. Then we can begin to move through life without hope or fear, capable of finally enjoying all the small pleasures, which are the most lasting.”
Source: Short stories of Latin America
“It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”
Source: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
“It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---”
Source: Basic Writings of Nietzsche
“It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.”
Source: Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)