“When a man starts out to build a world,
He starts first with himself”

“I went through a lot of changes in the years from when I first started out.”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

“As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

“He was himself and he had lost the speed
He started with, and he was left behind.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

“When does the building of the Spirit really begin to appear in a man's heart? It begins, so far as we can judge, when he first pours out his heart to God in prayer.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

“It was not our right to have become the world's bully and start this war in the first place.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

“Maybe anything's right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture. He straightened with a start. What was happening to him? … He was going to do something, but what? Yes, he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some nameless thing.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

“When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.”

C. S. Forester book The African Queen

“Man's power is first of all the result of hardening his heart against God: man affirms that he is strong, conquers the world, and builds cities.”

Jacques Ellul book The Meaning of the City