
“But those who are careless of accuracy in small things soon begin to neglect the most important.”
Aemilius, sec. 3
Parallel Lives
Variant translation: Everything has a small beginning.
"De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" Book V, Chapter 58
Omnium rerum principia parva sunt.
“But those who are careless of accuracy in small things soon begin to neglect the most important.”
Aemilius, sec. 3
Parallel Lives
Ch. 7.
“By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art,
Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow.”
Annus Mirabilis (1667), stanza 155.
Vesicles make clouds; they are trifles light as air, but then they make drops, and drops make showers, rain makes torrents and rivers, and these can alter the face of a country, and even keep the ocean to its proper fulness and use. It teaches a continual comparison of the small and great, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in principle, as the great does the small; and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment, to discover and obey law, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past.
Lecture notes of 1858, quoted in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) by Bence Jones, Vol. 2, p. 403
Frag. B 1, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
“All beginnings are very troublesome things.”
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 35.
“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”