Top 100 Instances Quotes
#1. And so it happens oft in many instances; more good is done without our knowledge than by us intended.
[Lat., Itidemque ut saepe jam in multis locis,
Plus insciens quis fecit quam prodens boni.]
Plautus
#2. There have been so many instances in my life where movies, music, or literature has made my life tangibly better.
James Ponsoldt
#3. Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.
Gregory Bateson
#4. Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.
Charles Caleb Colton
#5. There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.
Clive Thompson
#6. To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#7. Even if there are instances in which it can be mistook by onlookers, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool.
Criss Jami
#8. The human heart becomes softened by hearing of instances of gentleness and consideration.
Plutarch
#9. Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress.
Jason L. Riley
#10. Persons not habituated to reason often argue absurdly, because, from particular instances, they deduce general conclusions, and extend the result of their limited experience of individuals indiscriminately to whole classes.
Maria Edgeworth
#11. Careful economic research has shown public-sector workers receive a level of compensation, pension benefits, and retiree health coverage in excess of what comparable workers in the private sector enjoy. In some instances, the total premium can be 30 percent or higher.
Bob Beauprez
#12. The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,
where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.
Laurence Sterne
#13. He wouldn't kill me. He might not even hurt me - there had been several instances where I could've sworn he didn't want this violent life. But he wanted to touch me, and he was roguish enough to do whatever he thought necessary to reach that end goal. Like lock me in a room. Asshat. After
Laura Thalassa
#14. Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think.
Jon Meacham
#15. Schedules are impossible to me. I am excited to be on tour, but there are instances when I wish that I wasn't managed. The shows are fun, but six hour drives burn me out.
Jack Johnson
#16. There are very few instances where writers have also been effective image makers - different skill sets are required.
Fred Ritchin
#17. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable
advantage in all instances.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#18. The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.
John Stuart Mill
#20. Such is the power of truth that even the slightest whisper of it can handily drown out the most boisterous of lies, which may explain why in many instances God only needs to whisper.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#21. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
#22. While it may be true in some instances that our promised blessings will be fulfilled only in the eternities, it is also true that as we search, pray, and believe, we will often recognize things working together for our good in this life.
Susan W. Tanner
#23. Those who insist that a Church program exist for every contingency and need are as much in error as their counterparts who demand that government intervene in every aspect of our lives. In both instances the ideal balance is destroyed with a resultant detriment to human progress.
Dean L. Larsen
#24. As for the presence of large NGF [nerve growth factor] sources in snake venom and male genital organs, they may be conceived as instances of bizarre evolutionary gene expression.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#25. Our emotions are the continuous waves and undercurrents that enable us to flow but in some instances, when hold on to them, suppress them or repress them, or express the destructively, they disrupt the flow
Mavis Mazhura
#26. It must be observed that fishing with any living bait is to be condemned for the same reason as fishing with a worm: in all such instances we torture two animals at once for our amusement.
Thomas Young
#27. Some people will tell you that honesty is the best policy, but I disagree. In instances like this, I fully believe that feigned ignorance is the best policy.
Leila Sales
#28. World travel and getting to know clergy of all denominations has helped mold me into an ecumenical being. We're separated by theology and, in some instances, culture and race, but all that means nothing to me any more.
Billy Graham
#29. When I came to Britain I was in awe of the British press, afraid of them. But they're not as ferocious as people think. In some instances they are, but when it comes to taking on power they're really deferential.
Heather Brooke
#30. Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.
Joan D. Chittister
#31. Mozart is always a bit of a challenge - you know, even though it is often given to very young singers, it is actually the most complicated to sing in many instances.
Sarah Brightman
#32. Automation and technology don't cure behavioral ruts: they just create new instances of them.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#33. With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose, for good books are as scarce as good companions, and in both instances, all that we can learn from baad ones is, that some much time has been worse than thrown away.
Charles Caleb Colton
#34. Legalism insists on conformity to manmade religious rules and requirements, which are often unspoken but are nevertheless very real ... There are far too many instances within Christendom where our traditions and rules are, in practice, more important than God's commands.
Jerry Bridges
#35. The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.
Ernst Mayr
#36. There are few instances of the exercise of particular virtues which seem harder to attain to, or which appear more amiable and engaging in themselves, than those of moderation and the forgiveness of injuries.
Laurence Sterne
#37. Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.
Sheldon Vanauken
#38. I'm very wary of fawning too much over heroes. There's an old adage that heroes are best kept at arm's length, and in a few instances in my life, that's been true.
W. Earl Brown
#39. There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.
Pankaj Mishra
#40. THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait.
Demetri Martin
#41. The word 'leukemia' is a very frightening word. In many instances, it's a killer and it's something that you have to deal with in a very serious and determined way if you're going to beat it.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#42. My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.
Joyce Carol Oates
#43. If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.
John Stuart Mill
#44. Those characters wherein fear predominates over hope may apprehend too much from ... instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth nor experience.
Thomas Jefferson
#45. 'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel.
Douglas Rushkoff
#46. Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.
Sidney Poitier
#47. To be sure, in some instances these proceedings have been unconstitutional, but we must remember that it is not the first time since a war that there have been changes in governments by such methods.
Frank B. Kellogg
#48. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip,
Henry David Thoreau
#49. There is a great deal of quarrelling in the houses, and contending for power and authority; and the second wife is against the first wife, perhaps, in some instances.
Heber C. Kimball
#50. It has been an interesting road, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world, because I feel like all of those instances in my life I felt molded me and strengthened me and made me who I am.
Drew Brees
#51. The interests of the States ... ought to be made joint in every possible instance in order to cultivate the idea of our being one nation, and to multiply the instances in which the people shall look up to Congress as their head.
Thomas Jefferson
#52. IMMORAL, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral.
Ambrose Bierce
#53.
These moments were wondrous and divine, instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of the ethereal beings.
Angelology pg. 32
Danielle Trussoni
#54. The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.
Anatole Broyard
#55. What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we're encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?
Charles D'Ambrosio
#56. The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is 'afraid of being afraid'; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#57. Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.
George Washington
#58. In most instances, biotechnology, though a radically different approach, is a sustaining technology: It's a dramatically improved way of targeting problems that we hadn't been able to solve with the conventional approach of mainstream pharmaceutical companies.
Clayton Christensen
#59. Sometimes I'll turn the channel and there's the movie and I can honestly say that those last few minutes always fascinate me. It's one of the rare instances when image, music, and drama work effectively.
Madeleine Stowe
#60. The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As
Richard Dyer
#61. There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins - I'm sorry, I feel your pain?
Azar Nafisi
#62. Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.
Laurence Sterne
#63. You have to minimize your losses and try to preserve capital for those very few instances where you can make a lot in a very short period of time. What you can't afford to do is throw away your capital on suboptimal trades.
Richard Dennis
#64. I can remember only a small handful of instances in which I talked about politics with my parents. I remember my parents telling me that Daniel Ellsberg was a hero when I was six years old.
John Kiriakou
#65. The answer was straightforward: instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large. We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by the ease with which instances come to mind.
Daniel Kahneman
#66. I often question your actions, but rarely your reasoning. And this isn't one of those rare instances.
Sherry Thomas
#67. The concern right now is that families are paying for insurance, or getting insurance from their employer and trusting that health care will be available for their families. In too many instances now, the care they need isn't available.
Debbie Stabenow
#68. The improbability of a malicious story serves but to help forward the currency of it, because it increases the scandal. So that, in such instances, the world is like the pious St. Austin, who said he believed some things because they were absurd and impossible.
Laurence Sterne
#69. Who would be so cruel?"
"You ask this question after the Shoah? After countless instances of genocide? Human beings can be incredibly cruel.
Sylvain Reynard
#70. So high do these plants stand in the favour of the Chinese gardener, that he will cultivate them extensively, even against the wishes of his employer; and, in many instances, rather leave his situation than give up the growth of his favourite flower.
Robert Fortune
#71. Can companies just claim a total lack of political responsibility in how their technology is used in all instances? It's something that companies should be thinking about when they sell their technologies around the world.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#72. Parents will purchase the dot-com name for their baby. We have been aware of some instances where somebody didn't name their child a particular name because the dot-com wasn't available.
Bob Parsons
#73. I have yet to hear an instance where misfortune hit a man because he worked overtime. I know lots of instances where it hit men who did not.
Charles M. Schwab
#74. I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it.
Chuck Schumer
#75. To the dim and bewildered vision of humanity, God's care is more evident in some instances than in others; and upon such instances men seize, and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence.
George MacDonald
#76. What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body.
Elaine Scarry
#77. There were a couple of instances where what I'm thinking during sex was relevant, so I might as well show myself having sex. I could have gone from a shot of the bed to just showing the ceiling and my thought bubble. Or maybe just show the feet.
Chester Brown
#78. It is not secret here in Congress we have not had the discipline in many instances to keep our hands out of the cookie jar of Social Security. Now to stop this I propose that in the future that Congress cannot get its hands on the money in the first place.
Jeff Miller
#79. History is replete with instances of men, who, by dying with courage and compassion on their lips converted the hearts of their violent opponents.
Mahatma Gandhi
#80. The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.
Marilynne Robinson
#81. Waste no time lamenting with regard to what is lacking. In such instances, immediately turn focus toward what is to be ... and remain poised to receive that which is due.
T.F. Hodge
#82. Among people who might be described as having at least a passing regard for the English language, there are few instances of usage that evoke a desire to mutilate more than the perceived misuse of literally.
Ammon Shea
#83. An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment.
Felix Adler
#84. I don't think Islam has really been understood as a product of globalization. It might be one of these instances where globalism and tribalism ultimately go hand in hand.
Franklin Foer
#85. The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians.
James Lee Burke
#86. So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.
Jane Mayer
#87. Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.
Richard Owen
#88. I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They're family to me.
Tom Brokaw
#89. Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.
Philip K. Dick
#90. I've had two instances when I've met journalists face to face and we've had good interviews and I've said, 'We don't have children, by the way,' and then they've written it. I'm not sure what that's about. As misleading facts go, it's not a terrible one but it isn't true - we don't have kids.
Gina McKee
#91. In some instances, alimony has become akin to a social-welfare program provided by working women to their ex-husbands.
Diane Garnick
#92. I have had so many evidences of [God's] direction, so many instances when I have been controlled by some other power than my own will, that I cannot doubt that this power comes from above.
Abraham Lincoln
#93. The baseball fights, you don't ever see the squaring off like you do in hockey, and in some instances, that's where baseball fights can be potentially more dangerous because you've got guys running all over the place and people throwing punches at you that you don't even see half the time.
Tom Glavine
#94. The study of law, medicine and the arts, in each of these instances, the developed mindset is very helpful to one who is practicing meditation.
Frederick Lenz
#95. There are many instances when one person is enough to change the world.
Stephen Richards
#96. The mere power of saving what is already in our hands must be of easy acquisition to every mind; and as the example of Lord Bacon may show that the highest intellect cannot safely neglect it, a thousand instances every day prove that the humblest may practise it with success.
Samuel Johnson
#97. You cannot will yourself to be happy while believing that you have no right to happiness, or that you are unworthy of it. You cannot tell yourself to release aggressive thoughts if you think it is wrong to free them, so you must come to grips with your beliefs in all instances.
Jane Roberts
#98. The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.
Thomas Paine
#99. I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.
Jack Kevorkian
#100. In many instances, we are much better at fixing our mistakes after we've made them. In some situations, it is easier to sweep things under the rug and forget about them.
Dave Matthews
