Explore Quotes on Ifs

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don't find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don't cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God's truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living... Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.

He could tell at once that they carried different sorts of bubble bath mixed with the water though it wasn't bubble bath as Harry had ever experienced. One tap gushed pink and blue bubbles the size of footballs; another poured ice-white foam so thick that Harry thought it would have supported his weight if he'd cared to test it; a third sent heavily perfumed purple clouds hovering over the surface of the water. Harry amused himself for a while turning the taps on and off, particularly enjoying the effect of one whose jet bounced off the surface of the water in large arcs.

The rain wasn't the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.

If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.

Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.

I ask you, what good is a big picture window and the lavish appointments and a priceless decor in a home if there is no mother there?

If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, If cool my heart and high my head I think 'How lucky are the dead.

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!