Before Quotes - 2
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Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.
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More Before Quotes
I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.
Quentin Crisp— Ch. 12 (The Naked Civil Servant (1968))
What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector.
Jacques Attali— As quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music
The generation of an infinite number of bogusly 'objective' sentences in an English of agonizing patchwork mediocrity is no cause for celebration, even if it eventually amounts to a Borgesian paraphrase of our entire universe. [...] I liked the internet better before. The mistakes had flavor, passion, transparent purpose.
— Jonathan Lethem, "All-Star Thinkers on Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary", The Atlantic, 13 January 2011
Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.
william hazlitt— 1822 Table Talk, vol.2,'On Going a Journey'.
He who is void of virtuous Attachments in private Life, is, or very soon will be void of all Regard for his Country. There is seldom an Instance of a Man guilty of betraying his Country, who had not before lost the Feeling of moral Obligations in his private Connections.
Samuel Adams— Letter to James Warren (4 November 1775), reprinted in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, vol. III (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), p. 236
GG Allin: I've seen people in my audience leave with broken bones, broken arms. I've seen them leave on strechers. I've seen rapes before me.
gg allin— GG Allin on The Jerry Springer Show, May 5. 1993.
When I stand before the throne of God,I shall be judged Innocent
klaus barbie— Statement at His Trial
Here before us was sufficient evidence to show that it really was an entrance to a tomb, and by the seals, to all outward appearances that it was intact.
howard carter— Diary, 5 November 1922
You're leaping over the hedge before you come to the stile.
Miguel de Cervantes— Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part I, Book III, Chapter 4.
Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.
Nathaniel Hawthorne— Ch. I : The Old Pyncheon Family
The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.
matthew henry— P. 280. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
God give us men. The time demandsStrong minds, great hearts, true faith, and willing hands;Men whom the lust of office does not kill;Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;Men who possess opinions and a will;Men who have honor; men who will not lie;Men who can stand before a demagogueAnd dam his treacherous flatteries without winking;Tall men, sun-browned, who live above the fogIn public duty and in private thinking.
josiah gilbert holland— Wanted, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
And so I set these things down before the onset of the first of a thousand small physical degradations as, in a still-distant suburb, Death strides whistling towards me.
barry humphries— My Life as Me: A Memoir (closing line)
I'm excited, but I am also realistic. I have seen what happened to the people who came before me and failed. It's an unforgiving arena to be in.
jimmy kimmel— On the beginning of Jimmy Kimmel Live! — reported in Terry Morrow (January 24, 2003) "Kimmel & family head to ABC (beer's on hold)", The Knoxville News-Sentinel, p. 9.
The psycho-analyst infers the monstrous and abnormal from a trifle; it is often safe to reverse the process. If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.
arthur machen— "The Children of the Pool", in The Children of the Pool and Other Stories (New York: Arno Press, [1936] 1976) p. 83.
We have every reason to rejoice when there are so many gains and when favorable conditions abound on every hand. The end is not yet in sight, but it can not be far away. The road before us is shorter than the road behind.
lucy stone— A letter read by her husband, suffragist Henry Blackwell, to the twenty-fifth annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1893); as quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 4 (1902) by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper.
On making prisoners of our generals, they expected that we should perish from want of direction and order. It is incumbent, therefore, on our present commanders to be far more vigilant than our former ones, and on those under command to be far more orderly, and more obedient to their officers, at present than they were before…On the very day that such resolution is passed, they will see before them ten thousand Clearchuses instead of one.
Xenophon— Bk. 3, ch. 2; pp. 88-89.
“ All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.”
samuel r. delany— Section 2 (The Einstein Intersection (1967))
The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
ulysses s. grant— Conclusion
There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run And the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun Long before the white man and long before the wheel When the green dark forest was too silent to be real... Oh! The song of the future has been sung All the battles have been won On the mountain tops we stand All the world at our command We have opened up the soil with our teardrops and our toil
gordon lightfoot— Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Track 11, United Artists YouTube video
Something about first love defies duplication. before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there’s space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.
Tammara Webber— Where You Are, Chapter 1 (2011)
With those elegant footwork and gravity-defying turns Kathak opens a fantastical world before a dabbler, who is sure to fall deeply in love with its mesmerising ways.
— By Chencho Sherin Thomas in "Kathak has a Flexible Language". New Indian express. 4 December 2013. Retrieved on 17 January 2014.
A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.
john locke— John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Sec. 70
Be just,--not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all.
— Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron-Mills", Atlantic Monthly (April, 1861).
Speak with me, pity me, open the door: A beggar begs that never begg'd before.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act V, scene 3, line 77.
The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery . For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that 'A state half slave and half free cannot exist.' All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
— Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Conclusion.
Every time I stand before a beautiful beach, its waves seem to whisper to me: If you choose the simple things and find joy in nature's simple treasures, life and living need not be so hard.
Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Thou whom avenging pow'rs obey, Cancel my debt (too great to pay) before the sad accounting day.
Wentworth Dillon— Wentworth Dillon, On the Day of Judgment, Stanza 11
