Quotes on Firsts

It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last of the evening.

Unless you're one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace else. Somebody brought you.

Loss; is the returning of what never actually belonged to us in the first place.

Don’t despair if your heart has been through a lot of trauma. Sometimes that’s how beautiful hearts are remade: they are shattered first.

I'm a bit tight with money, but so what? I look at the money I'm about to spend on myself and ask myself if IKEA's customers can afford it... I could regularly travel first class, but having money in abundance doesn't seem like a good reason to waste it.. If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example. I have to do so for all the IKEA employees.

The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’. They're still up there, and they have made all the difference.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation.

The soul seeks God by faith, not by the reasonings of the mind and labored efforts, but by the drawings of love; to which inclinations God responds, and instructs the soul, which co-operates actively. God then puts the soul in a passive state where He accomplishes all, causing great progress, first by way of enjoyment, then by privation, and finally by pure love.

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

Look at me. I was a warrior on this land where the sun rises, now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first surrounded on this land - the red people with bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I can't see it.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

There is plenty of time to argue with new ideas later. They key is to take careful notes first and debate second.

What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

First the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.

What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.

Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

The person of old had the same brilliance of mind that we assume we have now. But that which made a thing become manifest for the first time is our great moment of creative happening.

This is the first teaching of the Knights: You will erase everything you had written in the book of your life up until now: restlessness, uncertainty, lies. And in the place of all this you will write the word courage.

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.

My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Pabst, had done her master's thesis on Tolkien. She showed me how the trilogy was patterned after Norse mythology. She was also the first person to encourage me to submit stories for publication. The idea of writing a fantasy based on myths never left me, and many years later, this would lead me to write Percy Jackson.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.