Quotes on Firsts

First quality: you are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will.

And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody. The kid never knew the man's name. But he never forgot that smile. "Hero" isn't the first word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!

Indianapolis, Indiana is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian--that's the kind of people for me.

Never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's.

My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water.

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion.

In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.

When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.

Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?

After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!- Elizabeth Bennet

You know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.’ And this means…?’ Well’, she said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic word.