Beginnings Quotes
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Beginnings are usually scary and endings are usually sad, but it’s the middle that counts. You have to remember this when you find yourself at the beginning.
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More Beginnings Quotes
The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest, where all human things... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
— Edith Hamilton The Greek Way (1930) Ch. 1
Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show; We may our ends by our beginnings know.
Sir John Denham— 1668 'Of Prudence', l.225-6.
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
willa cather— Part I, Ch. 1
The two of us had come a long way together from our humble beginnings and the basement apartment that had been our first home as newlyweds in 1957, when I was still a law student at Laval University in Quebec City.
jean chrétien— Chapter One, At Laurier's Desk, p. 28 ( See also: Aline Chretien)
Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show,We may our ends by our beginnings know.
john denham— Of Prudence, line 225.
I feel that I was made to complete things. To accomplish only a mass of beginnings and attempts would be to make a total failure of life. Perfection is the heritage with which my Creator has endowed me, and since this short life does not give completeness, I must have immortal life in which to find it.
randolph sinks foster— P. 338. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Rome has grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.
livy— Praefatio, sec. 4
Resist beginnings; the prescription comes too late when the disease has gained strength by long delays.
ovid— Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love), 91.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill’d; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Matthew Arnold— St. 18. (The Scholar Gypsy (1853))
Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.
Isaac Asimov— Chapter 17 “Gaia” section 5, p. 363
No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends; There's no clear-cut beginnings; And so far no dead-ends.
harry chapin— Circle
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
john cheever— The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1952 entry
When panting sighs the bosom fill, And hands by chance united thrill At once with one delicious pain The pulses and the nerves of twain; When eyes that erst could meet with ease, Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun Ecstatic conscious unison, The sure beginnings, say, be these Prelusive to the strain of love Which angels sing in heaven above?
arthur hugh clough— Love and Reason, st. 1 (1844).
By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art, Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow.
john dryden— Annus Mirabilis (1667), stanza 155.
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.
Franz Kafka— 13
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breath a word about your loss.
rudyard kipling— Stanza 3. (If— (1896))
From these early beginnings, and from the fact that nature had... equipped their minds with the powers of thought and understanding, thus putting all other animals under their sway, they next gradually advanced from the construction of buildings to the other arts and sciences, and so passed from a rude and barbarous mode of life to civilization and refinement.
vitruvius— Chapter I, Sec. 6
I feel that I was made to complete things. To accomplish only a mass of beginnings and attempts would be to make a total failure of life. Perfection is the heritage with which my Creator has endowed me, and since this short life does not give completeness, I must have immortal life in which to find it.
— Randolph Sinks Foster, p. 338. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
As Christianity in its beginnings was surrounded by the polytheistic beliefs and practices of the pagan world, a clear and authoritative expression of Monotheism was necessary. Hence the symbols of faith, or creeds, open with the words: "I [we] believe in God"...(APOSTLES' CREED; ATHANASIAN CREED:;; NICENE CREED.)
— page 501 of The Catholic Encyclopedia published in 1913.
I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.
— The Best of Cameron (Sevenoaks: New English Library, 1981) p. 49. ISBN 0450048810.
The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.
Andrew Dickson White— Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)
The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history , yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings .
— George W. Bush, inaugural address (20 January 2001)
Every time your heart is broken, a doorway cracks open to a world full of new beginnings, new opportunities.
Patti Roberts— The Angels Are Here (2010)
All beginnings are involuntary.
— Original: Todo começo é involuntário.
— Poem "O Conde D. Henrique", verse 1
The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies.
— Brian R. Gaines, in Convergence to the Information Highway
Mondays are the start of the work week which offer new beginnings 52 times a year!
David dweck— Real estate investor and speaker
The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.Men have these Four beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.
mencius— 2A:6, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 65
