Quotes about beginning
page 8

“But we couldn’t do otherwise. We couldn’t keep ten million refugees on our soil; we couldn’t tolerate such an unstable situation for who knows how long. That influx of refugees would have stopped—on the contrary. It would have gone on and on and on, until there would have been an explosion. We were no longer able to control the arrival of those people, in our own interest we had to stop it! That’s what I said to Mr. Nixon, to all the other leaders I visited in an attempt to avert the war. However, when you look at the beginning of the actual war, it’s hard not to recognize that the Pakistanis were the ones to attack. They were the ones who descended on us with their planes, at five o’clock that afternoon when the first bombs fell on Agra. I can prove it to you by the fact that we were taken completely by surprise.”

Indíra Gándhí (1917–1984) Indian politician and Prime Minister

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Indira Gandhi in New Delhi, February 1972

War, People

“Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"Fear, the Foundation of Religion"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Death, World, Fear, Making love

“There is no way to reach the end without mastering the beginning.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

Way

“In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future. And this gives rise to a strange apprehension about the reality surrounding us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.”

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) Chinese writer and screenwriter

2. "Writing of One's Own" (pp. 17–18)
Liuyan [《流言》] (1968)

People, World, Feeling, Reality

“I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God, without end.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 86

Love, Life, God, Making love

“What I know is that suffering creates suffering and the ONLY way to change that in the world is to become JOY and begin infecting other people with it. If you become joy, you will not make other people unhappy and the cycle of suffering… ends. Why do I care? Because I am you. Your suffering is the world's suffering. You can not suffer and not have it affect EVERYTHING in existence.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

People, World, Making love, Way

“I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 1, Ch. 3 - p.45
Giovanni's Room (1956)

Travel, Feeling, Parting

“The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

Parting

“If an egg is broken by outside force, life ends. If broken by inside force, life begins. Great things always begin from inside.”

Unknown author

Life, For women, Deep

“As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking. When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of "no-mind." At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

Source: The Power of Now (1997)

Feeling, Thinking, Self-confidence

“You must strive to find your own voice because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are going to find it at all.”

movie Dead Poets Society

John Keating character

Waiting

“It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. What proves beyond doubt the radicalism of German theory, and thus its practical energy, is that it begins from the resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being—conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: 'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!'”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

Men, Religion, Dogs

“Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].

Life, Men, History, Knowledge

“Every great achievement has a small beginning.”

Swami Samarpanananda Monk, Author, Teacher

Param ( Page 73 )

“An honest answer is the beginning of true friendship.”

Dr. Manuel

Friendship

“Every time I think that I’ve arrived, I am told I’m only just beginning…
And if I’m not discouraged yet, it’s only ‘cause I’m willing…”

Markéta Irglová (1988) Czech singer-songwriter, musician and actress

Source: píseň Mother

“Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise.”

Horace (-65–-8 BC) Roman lyric poet

Wise

“Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.”

Jim Rohn (1930–2009) American motivational speaker

Health, Search, Learning, Wealth

“I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Idea

“When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless.”

Pema Chödron (1936) American philosopher

Heart

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

Wise, Leadership

“Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Wisdom, Fear

“It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

“Somewhere in the desert, there's a forest And an acre before us But I don't know where to begin <br/”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Death with Dignity"
Lyrics, Carrie and Lowell (2015)

“It is time to leave behind childish attitudes and begin to pay a little more attention to what is really here. This is a time-body, a mortal body, but an immortal presence is moving in it. While the body is still warm, use this bodily life to rediscover your timeless Being.”

Mooji (1954) Jamaican spiritual teacher

Greater than Sky, Vaster than Space, (2018), Introduction

Life, Time

“What I have done up to this is nothing. I am only at the beginning of the course I must run. Do you imagine that I triumph in Italy in order to aggrandise the pack of lawyers who form the Directory, and men like Carnot and Barras? What an idea!”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

As quoted in Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito (1788 - 1815) as translated by Frances Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (1881), Vol. II, p. 94

Men, Imagination, Idea

“Your children are your seeds. Therefore, take great care of them by giving them nourishments from the very beginning of their journey.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Children

“Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with “I am.””

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.
Fichte Studies § 556

Heart

“The darkness isn't afraid of coming close to me, my fear of loneliness draws him towards me. Darkness surrounds me and despair takes hold of me. I start to torment my loneliness, and my silence begins to take my life. When I call my happiness darkness always turns happiness way. Darkness is not afraid of me coming close to me, my fear pulls it to me.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Life, Happiness, Fear, Way

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Life, Happiness, Fear, Way

“I begin to smell a rat.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book IV, Ch. 10.

“I have heard that in consequence of this 'sectional warfare', as Douglas calls it, Senator Mason of Va., had appeared in a suit of homespun. Now up in New Hampshire, the woolen and cotton mills are all busy, and there is no strike. They are busy making the very goods Senator Mason has quit buying! To carry out his idea, he ought to go barefoot! If that's the plan, they should begin at the foundation, and adopt the well-known 'Georgia costume' of a shirt-collar and pair of spurs!”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Idea, Business, Appearance

“The mystery of the world's existence — the mystery of the emergence of self-organizing matter or the mystery of the beginning of its motion.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

World

“It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type.”

Montgomery Schuyler (1843–1914) American architecture critic

Source: Military intelligence report dated March 1, 1919. See Behind Communism https://books.google.com.br/books?id=7QLiAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA83 by Frank L. Britton, 2012, p. 83

“In most cases, we cannot begin to understand what role a seemingly senseless event may have within the totality of the cosmos but recognizing its inevitability within the vastness of the whole can be the beginning of an inner acceptance of what is and thus a realignment with the wholeness of life.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 10

Life, Understanding

“Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade AT THIS MOMENT…it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of 'notables' to Petersburg as such a beginning. … [O]n the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: Letter to Friedrich Engels (8 October 1858), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856–59 (2010), pp. 346–347

World

“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Understanding, Change

“I'm beginning to feel like a Rap God, Rap God”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Rap God"
2010s, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

God, Feeling

“Demons are wary of talking and must be forced to speak. When demons are voluntarily chatty it's a trick to distract the exorcist. We must never ask useless questions out of curiosity. We but must interrogate with care. We always begin by asking for the demon's name.”

Gabriele Amorth (1925–2016) Italian Roman Catholic priest and exorcist

Source: "An Interview With Fr Gabriele Amorth - The Church's Leading Exorcist" (2001)

Question

“Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet.”

Novalis book Blüthenstaub

Fragment No. 71
Blüthenstaub (1798)

Time

“We must begin with ourselves: bishops and priests, who should not feel themselves superior to our brothers and sisters in the people of God. Pastoral workers, who should not understand service as power.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2020s, 2022 <br class="br">Source: "God does not want ‘a world governed by religious laws,’ pope tells Canadian clergy" https://religionnews.com/2022/07/28/god-does-not-want-a-world-governed-by-religious-laws-pope-tells-canadian-clergy/, 28 July 2022

God, People, Feeling, Understanding

“However many things we may have done, we are yet to a certain degree fresh for that which we are going to begin. Who, on the contrary, would not be stupified if he were to listen to the same teacher of any art, whatever it might be, through the whole day? But by change a person will be recruited, as is the case with respect to food, by varieties of which the stomach is re-invigorated and is fed with several sorts less unsatisfactorily than with one.”

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Quamlibet multa egerimus, quodam tamen modo recentes sumus ad id quod incipimus. quis non obtundi potest, si per totum diem cuiuscunque artis unum magistrum ferat? mutatione recreabitur sicut in cibis, quorum diversitate reficitur stomachus et pluribus minore fastidio alitur.
H. E. Butler's translation:
However manifold our activities, in a certain sense we come fresh to each new subject. Who can maintain his attention, if he has to listen for a whole day to one teacher harping on the same subject, be it what it may? Change of studies is like change of foods: the stomach is refreshed by their variety and derives greater nourishment from variety of viands.
Book I, Chapter XII, 5
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Food, Art, Teachers, Change

“When we understand that Who We Are is pure energy, the Essential Essence of Life itself, and that this energy not only composes us and comprises us, but is projected through us, from us, and outward into the world…and when we understand furthermore that energy affects other energy, that all energy impacts other energy…then we begin to understand that how we think about a thing determines how the thing is, and continues to be.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Life, World, Understanding, Thinking

“Nature is the greatest healer, by reconnecting back to nature, we begin changing the world all around us. We begin living from the inside out, breathing in the beautiful 'Chi,' becoming peaceful, developing serenity within ourselves, and that will make this planet a much more harmonious place to live in.”

Ralph Smart

World, Peace, Beauty, Nature

“Hey oh, here I am… and here we go life's waiting to begin”

Tom DeLonge (1975) American rock musician

da We Don't Need to Whisper)

Life, Waiting

“Let the fairy tale begin on a winter's morning, then, with one drop of blood newly-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as a single spot of claret on the lace cuff.”

Ellen Kushner (1955) American writer

Source: Swordspoint

Winter

“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”

Colum McCann Zoli

Source: Zoli

Life

“And where love ends, hate begins”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Love, Hate

“Flirting? We were merely indulging in a little risqué conversation," Magnus said, offended.
"When I begin to flirt, I assure you the entire room will know. My flirtations cause sensations.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale

“Peace doesn't require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Source: Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

People, Peace, Problem

“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book Middlesex

Source: Middlesex

Happiness

“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”

Maggie O'Farrell (1972) British writer

Source: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

World

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Works of Samuel Johnson

Books

We consider the quote as suspicious, we have no evidence supporting authorship

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”

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

No source given, and searches reveal no sources.

Kiss

“Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God… It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

Life, God, Water

“Going so soon? I wouldn't hear of it. Why my little party's just beginning.
~ Wicked Witch of the West Wizard of Oz”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“All glory comes from daring to begin.”

Ruskin Bond (1934) British Indian writer

Source: Scenes from a Writer's Life

“Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Thinking, Time

“When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.”

Eve Ensler (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist

“Before you marry, you have to get shot by an arrow and fall in love,” the boy explained. He paused thoughtfully. “But I don’t think the rest of it hurts as much as the beginning.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

Love, Boy, Thinking, Hurt

“Women were excited after sex, wired becasue in their minds the relationship was on beginning. Men went to sleep m the because for the orgasm had arrived and the relationship was done.”

Eric Jerome Dickey (1961) American author

Source: Pleasure

Women, Men, Sex, Sleep

“Partings are the beginnings of new meetings.

Beginnings happen because there are endings.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 22

Parting

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

“To begin, at the beginning…”

Dylan Thomas book Under Milk Wood

Source: Under Milk Wood

“I do love the beginning of the summer hols,' said Julian. They always seem to stretch out ahead for ages and ages.'
'They go so nice and slowly at first,' said Anne, his little sister. 'Then they start to gallop.”

Enid Blyton book Five Go Off in a Caravan

Source: Five Go Off in a Caravan

Love, Age, Sister, Summer

“Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it”

Thom Hartmann (1951) American journalist

Democracy

“Why is it that when we lose something big, we begin to lose everything else along with it?”

Donna Freitas (1972) American non-fiction writer and writer

Source: The Survival Kit

“There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult—to begin a war and to end it.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter XXII.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

War, People

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Upstream: Selected Essays

World

“What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.”

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

“Every search begins with beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested." The boy remembered an old proverb from his country. It said that the darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Search, Boy, Night, Country

“You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

World

“When we're focused on what we want, things begin to slot perfectly into place.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Variant: The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.
Source: The Way of Chuang Tzu

Love, Relationship, For Wife