I

Idealism
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
Winston Churchill
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than
cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.
H.L. Mencken
Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the
mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.
Carl Schurz
Ideas
That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
SWIFT, JONATHAN
Our land is not more the recipient of the men of all countries than of their ideas.
Groge Bancroft
The key to every man is his thought…. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
The BUDDHA
The basic idea underlying religion is to create an atmosphere for the spiritual development of the individual.
B R AMBEDKAR
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on it. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
Idleness
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
The frivolous work of polished idleness.
MACKINTOSH, SIR JAMES
Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are curel.
Attributed to John Quincy Adams
Lost time is never found again.
John Hill Aughey
Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds, and the holiday of fools.
Lord Chesterfield
There is no place in civilizasion for the idler. None of us has any right to ease.
Henry Ford
Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
Benjamin Franklin
The way to be nothing is to do nothing.
Nathaniel Howe
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.
Proverb
Of all our faults, the one that we excuse most easily is idleness.
Francois de la Rouchefoucauld
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.
William Cowper
Not only is he idle who doing nothing, but he that might be better employed.
Socrates
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
Oscar Wilde
Ignorance
Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because it is an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.
SELDEN, JOHN
Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.
Louis Brandeis
Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.
Confucius
To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
Benjamin Disraeli
To the ignorant even the words of the wise seem foolishness.
Euripides
There is no darkness, but ignorance.
Shakespeare
Nothing is worse than active ignorance.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Everybody is ignorant only on different subjects
Wil Rogers
Ignorant men
Don’t know what good they hold in their hands until they’ve flung it away.
Sophocles
Imagination
All our wants, beyond those which a very moderate income will
supply, are purely imaginary.
BOLINGBROKE, HENRY
With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
DICKENS, CHARLES
The shadow of a mighty name.
LUCAN
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
The worst sinner has a future, even as the greatest saint has had a past, No one is so good or so bad as he imagines.
RADHAKRISHNAN
The human race is governed by its imagination.
Napoleon Bonaparte
To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
Anatole France
Imitation
I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Men often applaud an imitation, and hiss the real thing.
Aesop
Imitation is the sincerest flattery.
Charles C. Cotton
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set; on the cortrary, he who imitates what is good always falls short.
Francesco Guicciardini
A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this; that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.
Quintilian
Immortality
Man is a noble animal, splended in ashes and pompous in the grave.
BROWNE, CHARLES FARRAR, BROWNE, SIR THOMAS
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
Let us not lament too much…the passing of our friends. They are not dead, but simply gone before us along the road which all must travel.
Aniphanes
Whatsoever that be within us that feels, thinks, desires, and animates, is something celestial, divine, and consequently, imperishable.
Aristotle
My humble friend, we know not how to live this life which is so short yet seek one that never ends.
Anatole France
Either the soul is immortal and we shall not die, or it perishes with the flesh, and we shall not know that we are dead. Live, then, as if you were eternal.
Andre Maurois
Independence
To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.
COBBETT, WILLIAM
The moral progression of a people can scarcely begin till they are independent.
James Martineau
To be independent is the business of a few only; it is the privilege of the strong.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If it is man’s privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be interdependent.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Individual
Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.
Adre Gide
An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation.
Walt Whitman
Individuality is everywhere to be spared and respected as the root of everything good.
Jean Paul Richter
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.
John Stuart Mill
Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger fo Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
A. Whitney Griswold
But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.
John Stuart Mill
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
Ingratitude
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Eric Hoffer
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain
Injustice
No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.
Aristotle
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
Plato
He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.
Seneca
God never made man that he may consider another man as an untouchable. To say that a single human being, because of his birth, becomes an untouchable, unapproachable, or invisible, is to deny God.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Who can protest an injustice but does not is an accomplice to the act.
TALMUD
I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If he has a place and work for me—and I think he has—I believe I am ready.
Abraham Lincoln