
“If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.”
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma
Context: If thou think defeat is the end of thee, then go not forth to fight, even though thou be the stronger. For Fate is not purchased by any man nor is Power bound over to her possessors. But defeat is not the end, it is only a gate or a beginning.
“If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.”
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
2000s, 2001, Freedom and Fear Are at War (September 2001)
“Only God knows the beginning and the end.”
Source: Think Big (1996), p. 122
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.”
Fellini on Fellini (1976) edited by Anna Keel and Christian Strich; translated by Isabel Quigly.
Variant: There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”
Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5; also quoted in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002) by Avi Sagi, p. 43
Context: It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness.
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
“Womanliness means only motherhood;
All love begins and ends there.”
The Inn Album (1875).