“If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.”
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer
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.”
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States
2000s, 2001, Freedom and Fear Are at War (September 2001)
“Only God knows the beginning and the end.”
Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon
Source: Think Big (1996), p. 122
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.”
Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker
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.
Robert Frost book Mountain Interval
Mountain Interval (1920), 5. In the Home Stretch, Line 187-192
General sources
Context: “My dear,
It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe,
For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.
There are only middles.
“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”
Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist
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.”
Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era
The Inn Album (1875).