I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation.”
Source: Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe
“It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated)
“It was not that long ago a bunch of researchers got on a boat and started chugging for the South Pole to find evidence of the melting glaciers and global warming, and they got stuck in the ice and it took three ice breakers and a helicopter to rescue them. Yet they still carry the day in the pop culture that global warming is happening.”
“It was not that low-income renters didn’t know their rights. They just knew those rights would cost them.”
Source: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.”
Source: Jean Santeuil
“It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)
“It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.”
Source: The collected essays and prose sketches
“It was not that the ocean depths served the creatures there with darkness, to protect them from attack--a darkness they could light, as they needed, with luminescence--but vice versa: the darkness gave rise to those that were pressure-resistant and could illuminate themselves.”
Source: Fiasco
“It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden of Eden.”
“It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book.”
“It was not the blatant evil that broke the soul. No, in the face of utter darkness, the human spirit often rose to soaring heights. It was the shades of gray, the nuances and subtleties that wore people down. It was dealing with sellouts and side deals, small injustices and petty grievances that turned heroes into stoop-shouldered, weary old men. That was how they crumbled, idealists like this young man. They tripped on the garbage heap of miserly greed and fearful half-measures.”
Source: The Roots of Resistance: - Love and Revolution -
“It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.”
Source: The Historian
“It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.”
Source: The Flamethrowers: A Novel
“It was not the fear of death. No: that fear had been inside him for many years, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over his own shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream, and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.”
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera
“It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.”
Source: Everything Is Illuminated
“It was not the first time Diin Ṛũl had destroyed a galaxy.”
Source: Dark Cascade
“It was not the goal that really concerned us, the journey was the thing. Who ever reaches any goal? From what journey can we return? We know of the poverty about us, of the work and worry, but we know of a degree of freedom, of a stunted beauty. We have warm open days and sunshine in Carolina. Much is denied us. But we have, we have. And an attitude is more powerful than any circumstance.”
“It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.”
Source: The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton
“It was not the lover she regretted,' wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. 'It was the friend.”
Source: Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner
“It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.”
Source: 1984
“It was not the money that was my main motive; it was the challenge and the thrill where I got my kicks. Armed robbery to me was like a sport. To take on an armored vehicle with two armed security guards—it was like an athlete attending the Olympic Games.”
Source: The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
“It was not the pain itself I craved but something I refused to articulate even to myself, whose true nature I feared to know. It sufficed, leaving me sweating, spent, and fractionally closer to being strong.”
Source: Jarring Sex
“It was not the part of His kindly love that he who was to praise God's divine generosity in regard to others should be compelled to condemn it in regard to himself.”
Source: Oration on the Dignity of Man
“It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.”
“It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if se adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.”
Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover
“It was not the people or the Roman soldiers who put Jesus on the cross - it was your sins and my sins that made it necessary for Him to volunteer His death.”
Source: Billy Graham in Quotes
“It was not the purpose of poetry to record anything and everything, to merely describe either the outer world or some subjective mood, but to speak from the imagination of the poet to the imagination of the reader.”
“It was not the right-wing Russians or the gun-toting settlers who carried out the Nakba. The Nakba is the legacy of Zionism's putatively socialist wing. It was the grandfathers and mothers of the "enlightened public" of today's Israel who literally drove tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinians into the sea in 1947-48 all along the Mediterranean coast, or who marched them at gunpoint to Ramallah.”
“It was not the scorn of many that left her confused and vulnerable, but the kindness of the few.”
Source: A Feast for Crows
“It was not the sorrow of the world that broke the heart of Christ, but its wickedness. He was equal to its sorrow ... He began by being the world's healer. But what broke him was its sin.”
“It was not the story of design or clothes, it was the fantasy of women that made me want to work in fashion.”
“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
Source: The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“It was not the thought of seeing God that upset her. It was the thought of being seen.”
Source: Not Wanted on the Voyage
“It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.”
Source: Mother Night
“It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"
Yes," I said.
You've been standing here a long time," he said.
I know," I said.
You waiting for somebody?" he said.
No," I said.
Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on.”
Source: Mother Night
“It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that had flickered out.”
“It was not the United States who invaded Kuwait; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that went to war with Iran; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that fired chemical weapons at Iran; it was Iraq. And it was not the United States that murdered innocent Iraqi citizens with chemical weapons; it was Iraq.”
“It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.”
“It was not the visible sun, but its invisible Creator who consecrated this day for us, when the Virgin Mother, fertile of womb and integral in her virginity, brought him forth, made visible for us, by whom, when he was invisible, she too was created. A Virgin conceiving, a Virgin bearing, a Virgin pregnant, a Virgin bringing forth, a Virgin perpetual. Why do you wonder at this, O man?”
“It was not the volume of sin that sent Christ to the cross; it was the fact of sin.”
“It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”
Source: Shibumi: A Novel
“It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.”
Source: Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
“It was not through democratic methods that Britain bagged India.”
Source: Collected Works
“It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.”
Source: Bulfinch's Medieval Mythology: The Age of Chivalry
“It was not to be a blunt instrument of instruction, but something subtler. Humour and satire were to be its methos. 'It must be written in a jocular way,' he explained; to sway the opinions of the 'multitude' required not disputation, but amusement and 'phantasie' that would delight and charm.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“It was not to flaunt feelings of superiority that the elders of the Kaisaruwatte family clung to the traditions of their patrician lineage, but for self-preservation of themseleves and their way of life, now declining in the face of social change. It was their inability to adapt to change due to the rigidity of their adherence to tradition, that was also the cause of their decline.”
“It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.”
“It was not uncommon for the children to be told they were being treated this way because it was their bad karma and they must have hurt a child in a past life.”
“It was not unless one lifted one's gaze from all the allegedly normal events occurring before one's eyes and looked at the executioner's sword hanging over everyone's head that the normality was revealed as a sort of mass insanity. . . Passengers on a ship who are . . . engaging in all the usual shipboard activities appear perfectly normal as long as their ship is sailing safely in quiet seas, but . . . deranged if in full view of them all their ship is caught in a vortex that may shortly drag it and them to destruction.”
Source: The Fate of the Earth
“It was not until 1986 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began to draft laws requiring immigrants to be tested for and found free of HIV. This legislation was sponsored in the Senate by Senator Jesse Helms and was approved - unanimously - in June 1987. "This Senate action was extraordinary," notes a legal opinion, "in that it assumed a responsibility, previously entrusted to the HHS, to determine which communicable diseases would be grounds for excluding aliens.”
Source: Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor