Quotes on Firsts

I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.

His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.

And at home in the United States we found continued and increased persecution, first of leaders of the Communist Party, and then of all honest anti-fascists.

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.

The young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will... They are splendid riders, first-rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.

Government's first duty and highest obligation is public safety.

Rivers and mountains are beautiful and made heroes bow and compete to catch the girl- lovely earth. Yet the emperors Shih Huang and Wu Ti were barely able to write. The first emperors of the Tang and Sung dynasties were crude. Genghis Khan, man of his epoch and favored by heaven, knew only how to hunt the great eagle. They are all gone. Only today are we men of feeling.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.

If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first_x000D_ century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.

You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?

I made a ridiculous statement when I first went to North Carolina State. I said I know basketball down there was like life or death. It was very wrong. It's more important.

You're mine," she whispered. "Mine, as I'm yours. And if we die, we die. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first, we'll live.

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

Your life is much more important that you can imagine... it is your first treasure.

Others first. Whatever your corporate mission, paint a clear and compelling picture that others can understand and embrace. State your mission in terms that appeal to your team's best instincts. Persuade and empower as if you are leading and mentoring volunteers.

The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc.

Words sing. They hurt. They teach. They sanctify. They were man's first, immeasurable feat of magic. They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past.