Quotes about beginning
page 13

“I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Source: Steve Jobs

Age, Thinking

“When you know that everything matters—that every move counts as much as any other—you will begin living a life of permanent purpose.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Life

“Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand
Unshaken when I fall; that I may know
The shattered fragments of my song will come
At last to finer melody in you;
That I may tell my heart that you begin
Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Source: The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

Strong, Heart

“You are always looking at people like this.” And then she made a face, one he couldn’t possibly begin to describe.
“If I ever look like that,” he said dryly, “precisely like that, to be more precise, I give you leave to shoot me.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: Just Like Heaven

People

“Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Life

“Do you really want to be happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you've got. Do you want to be really miserable? You can begin by being discontented.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

That Sort of Bear.
Source: The Tao of Pooh (1982)

Happiness

“Life, he realized, was much like a song.
In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Steve Miller, Chapter 36, Steve, p. 376
Source: 2000s, The Last Song (2009)

Life

“No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Source: Anarchism and Other Essays

Law, Idea, Time

“You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”

Sherwood Anderson book Winesburg, Ohio

Source: Winesburg, Ohio

Dreams, Learning, Time, Forgetting

“Holy crap! Your story was so long I forgot the beginning! - Ichigo Kurosaki”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Source: Bleach, Volume 06

“When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Life, Past, Joy

“Right before the explosions begin, I find a star.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Star

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. xxxii

World, Courage, Sleep

“Llarimar had told him to do his best. That sounded like an awful lot of work. Unfortunately, doing nothing was beginning to seem like even MORE work.”

Brandon Sanderson book Warbreaker

Source: Warbreaker

“Words are where most change begins.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

Change

“that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)”

Wally Lamb (1950) american novelist

Source: The Hour I First Believed

History, Understanding, Sense

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Thinking

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer.”

Harriet Tubman (1820–1913) African-American abolitionist and humanitarian

Dreams, Motivational, Success, Inspirational

“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Time, Sun

“I hear they feed you in Sing Sing,” Evie muttered. “Three squares a day.”

“Evangeline,” Will said with a sigh. “Charity begins at home.”

“So does mental illness.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

Home, Singing

“You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthfulness in you that no one will be able to take away from you.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Youth, Feeling, Soul

“It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Pain, Happiness, Peace, Feeling

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”

Herman Melville book Billy Budd, Sailor

Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 21
Source: Billy Budd, Sailor
Context: Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake tho' for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

Color, Drawing

“I don't like self-righteous people," I say.

"What's to like?" says Haymitch, who begins sucking the dregs out of the empty bottles.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

People

“For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

Way, Home, Courage, Heart

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Hope

“Then let amourous kisses dwell
On our lips, begin and tell
A Thousand and a Hundred score
A Hundred and a Thousand more”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Kiss

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Art

“Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.”

José Rizal book Noli Me Tángere

Source: Noli Me Tángere

Selfishness

“Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

People, Problem

“The way to learn to do things is to do things. The way to learn a trade is to work at it. Success teaches how to succeed. Begin with the determination to succeed, and the work is half done already.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Way, Learning, Success

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Hope, Waiting

“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I’m beginning to believe it.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

As quoted in Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941) by Irving Stone, Ch. 6

Boy, Funny

“Either that boy is the sanest creature on Earth, he thought, or he is so disturbed that our tests cannot even begin to scratch the surface.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Last Guardian

Boy

“You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.”

Ron Rash book Serena

Source: Serena

“I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

Problem, Universe

“Endings are beginnings, and beginnings are ours to turn into something good.”

Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer

Source: Everlasting

“Fine. Let’s begin with something even you can’t screw up.” – Death
“Way to build up my crappy confidence there. You should volunteer for the suicide hotline.” – Nick
“What makes you think I don’t?” – Death”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Death, Way, Confidence, Thinking

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Learning

“The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Idea

“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

People, Change

“It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.”

Tove Jansson book The Summer Book

Source: The Summer Book

Star, Summer

“Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.”

Gretel Ehrlich (1946) American writer

Source: The Solace of Open Spaces

Death, Autumn, Water, Season

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Wisdom

“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“One of the most dynamic and significant changes you can make in your life is to make the commitment to drop all negative references to your past, to begin living now.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Source: Don't Worry, Make Money: Spiritual and Practical Ways to Create Abundance and More Fun in Your Life

Life, Change, Past

“Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”

Margaret Atwood book The Robber Bride

Source: The Robber Bride

Problem

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do so with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”

Og Mandino (1923–1996) American author

Life, Understanding, Dead

“Freedom begins between the ears.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

Freedom

“There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

Beauty, Baby

“When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Love, Peace, Understanding, Joy

“He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux

Reading

“Some people fall head over heels. Other people begin to fall without even knowing it—love grows like a spring flower beneath last autumn’s leaves and catches them by surprise.”

Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer

Source: Summer in the City

Love, People, Spring, Flowers

“Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

“When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Suffering

“The story of how I left Huckleberry begins -- as do all worthy stories -- with a goat”

John Scalzi The Last Colony

Source: The Last Colony

“I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

“At the beginning of all growth, everything imitates.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: This Earth of Mankind

“When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.”

Stephen King book Rage

Source: Rage

Pain, World, Tree, Time

“take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Thinking

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Life, Despair

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Children, Dreams, Color, Sea

“If you were to turn into a snake tomorrow and begin devouring Humans, and from the same mouth you devoured Humans, you cried out to me 'I love you!', would I still be able to say 'I love you' the same way I do today?”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Love, Way

“Don’t waste another day of your life grieving over something that you cannot do anything about. Let God give you a new beginning. Your mistakes are not enough to stop God if you don’t let them.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Life, God

“It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.”

Sarah Dessen book What Happened to Goodbye

What Happened To Goodbye (2011)
Source: What Happened to Goodbye

Waiting

“And I was even beginning to think home might be with you.”

Ben Sherwood (1964) American author, journalist, and entrepreneur

Home, Thinking

“To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of 26 and 18 is to do pretty well”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Happiness, Age, Perfection

“You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”

Mary Roach book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Source: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Death, Birth, Forgetting

“When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening…. I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Books

“from the beginning, through the
middle years and up to the
end:
too bad, too bad, too bad.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

“If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Damned

Source: Damned

Life, Children, People

“You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.”

Jonathan Carroll book Outside the Dog Museum

Source: Outside the Dog Museum

Love, Lovers

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

"A Bouquet of Wild Flowers", article published in the Missouri Ruralist (20 July 1917)

Life, Learning, Mother's Day

“A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.”

Amy Tan book The Bonesetter's Daughter

Source: The Bonesetter's Daughter

Mother's Day, For Mother

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Housing

“Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It's not like a puzzle piece where there's an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Parting

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

Men, Thinking

“… with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.”

André Breton book Nadja

Source: Nadja

“He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Uh-uh. We've played this game before. I hide. You never seek. I'm a bit slow on the uptake, but I'm beginning to sense a pattern."
- Clay to Elena”

Kelley Armstrong book Bitten

Source: Bitten

Game, Sense

“Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

Richard Ford book The Lay of the Land

Source: The Lay of the Land

People

“Egyptians believe in the power of the sunrise. They believe each morning begins not just a new day, but a new world.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

World

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”

David Malouf book An Imaginary Life

Source: An Imaginary Life

Pain

“Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“No person [should] walk out into the world to begin the day until he or she has stood beneath the cross to receive God’s love.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Love, God, World, Personality

“A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones.”

Anita Shreve (1946–2018) American writer

Source: Eden Close

Life, Personality

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

Tana French In the Woods

Source: In the Woods

Truth, Lie

“Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Time, Past, Night

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: A&P: Lust in the Aisles

“But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Introduction I. Of the Difference Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Variant: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.
Context: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of them selves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)... It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight,—whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience.

Knowledge

“I was beginning to see, though, that the unknown wasn't always the greatest thing to fear. The people who know you best can be risker, because the words they say and things they think have the potential to be not only scary but true, as well.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

People, Fear, Thinking

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Birth