Y Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with Y. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.”
Source: The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story
“Yet in the 1950s and '60s, a wide range of historians quickly and uncritically...[sought to] rule out of serious discussion of the American founding any suggestion that important, even defining, conflicts prevailed between rich, well-connected founders--those men of a variety of opinions of how government should work, who signed the Declaration of Independence and framed the U.S. Constitution--and the huge majority of unrich, ordinary Americans who--though we know so little about it--spent the founding era protesting, rioting, petitioning, occupying, and making demands on government in hopes of achieving access to economic development and restraining the power of wealth.
That economic conflict wasn't between revolutionary Americans and British authorities. It was between Americans and other Americans. I've come to see it--not its resolution but the conflict itself--as defining our emergence as a people.”
“Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current, rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as drift-wood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered; and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, of old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.”
Source: The Book of Wonder
“Yet in the celebrity-obsessed culture, where everything of you is a shot on the red carpet, I don't want that to dominate my image. First and foremost, I am an actor. I want great roles.”
“Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.”
Source: Fighting in Spain
“Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness.”
“Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.”
“Yet instead of being there for me, that human came and beat the hell out of me.”
Source: A Life for a Life
“Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.”
“Yet is beauty the pleasing trickery that cheateth half the world.”
“Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.”
Source: Religio Medici: Hydriotaphia : and the Letter to a Friend
“Yet is it possible in terms of the motion of atoms to explain how men can invent an electric motor, or design and build a great cathedral? If such achievements represent anything more than the requirements of physical law, it means that science must investigate the additional controlling factors, whatever they may be, in order that the world of nature may be adequately understood.”
“Yet is our deepest desire is truly to live and go on living, why do we blindly insist that death is the end? Why not at least try and explore the possibility that there may be a life after?”
Source: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller: Revised and Updated Edition
“Yet is there one more cursed than they all,
That canker-worm, that monster, jealousie,
Which eats the heart and feeds upon the gall,
Turning all love's delight to misery,
Through fear of losing his felicity.”
Source: Hymns. Visions. Elegiac poems
“Yet is there one true line, the pearl of pearls:
Man dreams of Fame while woman wakes to love.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)
“Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?”
“Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong?”
Source: The Nice and the Good
“Yet it has to be recognized that these checklists conform to managerial norms of measuring sustainability because they are made up of easily quantifiable items: more solar roofs, less airborne particulates; more transit riders, less water use per capital; more housing density, less golf courses. Greening the world, from this standpoint, suggests that the ecological crisis can be fixed by making slight technical adjustments to people's habits and interactions with their daily environments. When sustainability is defined by a set of metrics, it reflects a purely physical understanding of how societies strive to be ecologically resilient. By contrast, there are no indexes for measuring environmental justice, no indicators for judging equity of access to the green life, and no technical quantum for assessing the social sustainability of a population. The vogue for green governance by the numbers is a recipe for managing, rather than correcting, inequality.”
Source: Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City
“Yet it is also a tonic and an antidote to dullness to be with the Serbs. They possess the irresponsible gaiety that we traditionally connect with the Irish, with whom they have often been compared. Other less convenient sides of the Irish character are also typical in the Serbs, such as a cheerful contempt for punctuality in daily life and a ready willingness, arising clearly from politeness and good nature, to make promises that are not always fulfilled. But perhaps the most pronounced of these similarities is to be found in the songs of Serbia and Ireland. With both peoples the historic songs about the past are songs of sorrow, or noble struggles against overwhelming odds, of failure redeemed by unconquerable resolve. There is nothing strange in this combination of laughing gaiety and profound melancholy. It is often only those who are truly capable of the one emotion who also have the faculty for the other.”
“Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won't hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!”
“Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.”
Source: New Seeds of Contemplation
“Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.”
Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Adventurer and Idler
“Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.”
“Yet it is only love which sets us free.”
“Yet it is rare that histories of neoliberalism take into account the insurance-specific dimension of this phenomenon. Insurance is a crucial sector of social life. It reflects the prevalent conception of solidarity - the 'social bond', as we so trivially put it nowadays.”
Source: Nature is a Battlefield: Towards a Political Ecology
“Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.”
Source: Simple Passion
“Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.”
Source: The Border Trilogy
“Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”
Source: Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy
“Yet it is true—skin can mean a great deal. Mine means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequences. It means that my friends do not always like to be seen with me in the street. It means that no matter how many books I read, or languages I master, I will never be anything but a curiosity—like a talking pig or a mathematical horse.”
Source: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
“Yet it is unassailably true that so long as we lack omniscience and do not know all of the future, all our generalizations are fallible or only probable. And the history of human error shows that a general consensus, or widespread and unquestioned feeling of certainty, does not preclude the possibility that the future may show us to be in error.”
Source: An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method
“Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.”
“yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there's but common greenness after that.”
Source: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition
“Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'.”
“Yet it seems that a final race struggle is unavoidable”
“Yet it seems to me finishing well in this life is not so much about who is the best or greatest at something, but rather who embraces lowliness of heart. Laying down one's rights- meekness- is a blessed virtue, one that must surely come straight from the Throne of Grace.”
Source: The Abram's Daughters Collection: Five Novels in One
“Yet it was her inner light that captured him most.”
Source: Stealing the Preacher
“Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, 'Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.' Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.”
“Yet it was not that a rapture or a glory which had once shone around her had passed away from the world. The rapture and the glory whose hauntings she suffered had never manifested themselves in her life at all.”
Source: The Nice and the Good
“Yet it was only as I began to interrogate my fear of "power" —he way that fear was related to my own class background where I had so often seen those with class power coerce, abuse, and dominate those without.”
Source: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
“Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.”
“Yet it wasn’t the Mississippi River that captured Jim Bridger’s imagination : it was the Missouri. A mere six likes from his ferry the two great rivers joined as one, the wild waters of the frontier pouring into the bromide current of the everyday. It was the confluence of old and new, known and unknown, civilization and wilderness. Bridger lived for the rare moments when the fur traders and voyageurs tied their sleek Mackinaws at the ferry landing, sometimes even camping for the night. He marveled at their tales of savage Indians, teeming game, forever plains, and soaring mountains.
The frontier for Bridger became an aching presence that he could feel, but could not define, a magnetic force pulling him inexorably toward something that he had heard about, but never seen. A preacher on a swaybacked mule rode Bridger’s ferry one day. He asked Bridger if he knew God’s mission for him in life. Without pause Bridger answered, “Go to the Rockies”. The preacher was elated, urging the boy to consider missionary work with the savages. Bridger had no interest in bringing Jesus to the Indians, but the conversation stuck with him. The boy came to believe that going west was more than just a fancy for someplace new. He came to see it as a part of his soul, a missing piece that could only be made whole on some far-off mountain or plain.”
Source: The Revenant
“Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.”
“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
Source: Jane Eyre
“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”
“Yet it's true that looks matter in politics... It is also true that perfecting the outer shell has become an obsession in this country... Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards almost always look good, and pretty much the same, in dark suits or casual wear. Fred Thompson always looks crepuscular and droopy. Often Hillary Clinton looks great, and sometimes she looks tired, heavier or puffier.”
“Yet joy remains even when happiness fades. No matter the circumstance, Christians who plant their hope in God can harvest genuine joy in the rocky soil of adversity or in the deepest, darkest valley of pain.”
Source: Christ and Calamity: Grace and Gratitude in the Darkest Valley
“Yet just as a classic heroic tale needs a Saint, an unabashedly White-Hatted and periodically naive champion of romantic love, so too it isn’t quite complete without that other, more dubious, good guy: The Black Knight.”
Source: Fool on the Hill
“Yet just as the day has two halves, one governed by the sun and the other by the moon, so there are many who are people of the day and who busy themselves with daytime deeds, whilst others are children of the night, their minds consumed with nocturnal notions; but yet there are some in whom the two merge like the rising of the sun and the moon in a day.”
“Yet know this: there is no such thing as an incorrect path - for on this journey you cannot "not get" where you are going. It is simply a matter of speed-merely a question of when you will get there-yet even that is an illusion, for there is no "when," neither is there a "before" or "after." There is only now; an eternal moment of always in which you are experiencing yourself.”
Source: The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
“Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free; love me no more, but love my love of thee.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated)