Elizabeth The First Quotes

All the bees knew Sugar; they carried their feelings for her with them in their genes, they could sense her from more than half a mile away and would no sooner find her a threat than fly to the moon. But Elizabeth the First sensed Grady Parkes from half a mile away too, and her resulting hum was not one of blissful content. It was his smell, partly: an aftershave, with base notes of tobacco and cedar and a hint of bitter herbs, and his natural scent, which was too sour for Elizabeth the First's liking. She registered him as something to watch out for and passed this on through the realm. ~ Sarah-Kate Lynch

Lycurgus the Lacedaemonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house. ~ Plutarch

I am just like you. My immediate response to most situations is with reactions of attachment, defensiveness, judgment, control, and analysis. I am better at calculating than contemplating.

Let's admit that we all start there. The False Self seems to have the "first gaze" at almost everything.

The first gaze is seldom compassionate. It is too busy weighing and feeling itself: "How will this affect me?" or "How can I get back in control of this situation?" This leads us to an implosion, a self-preoccupation that cannot enter into communion with the other or the moment. In other words, we first feel our feelings before we can relate to the situation and emotion of the other. Only after God has taught us how to live "undefended," can we immediately stand with and for the other, and in the present moment. It takes lots of practice.

On my better days, when I am "open, undefended, and immediately present," as Gerald May says, I can sometimes begin with a contemplative mind and heart. Often I can get there later and even end there, but it is usually a second gaze. The True Self seems to always be ridden and blinded by the defensive needs of the False Self. It is an hour-by-hour battle, at least for me. I can see why all spiritual traditions insist on daily prayer, in fact, morning, midday, evening, and before we go to bed, too! Otherwise, I can assume that I am back in the cruise control of small and personal self-interest, the pitiable and fragile "R ~ Richard Rohr

It's the most annoying question and they just can't help asking you. You'll be asked it at family gatherings, weddings, and on first dates. And you'll ask yourself far too often. It's the question that has no good answer. It's the question that when people stop asking it, you'll feel even worse. - WHY ARE YOU SINGLE? ~ Liz Tuccillo

As I shut the door and started to walk away, I heard him say, "Hey. Sydney."
"Yeah?"
"You had on a shirt with mushrooms on it, and your hair was pulled back. Silver earrings. Pepperoni slice. No lollipop."
I just looked at him, confused. Layla was walking toward us now.
"The first time you came into Seaside," he said. "You weren't invisible, not to me. Just so you know. ~ Sarah Dessen

Andrew Luck, if he gets to his first Super Bowl and he wins that Super Bowl, that means he won on the road every game except for that first playoff game. He went and beat Peyton Manning ... Then that means he went and beat Tom Brady ... Then he would either have to beat Aaron Rodgers or the Seattle Seahawks. That's a pretty tough hill to climb. If he does that, he's just solidified himself in that conversation as an elite quarterback. ~ Charles Woodson

A spouse who refuses to cultivate or fan physical intimacy first devalued the marriage in their mind and priorities. Spouses who defile their marriage bed first lost honor for their marriage. ~ Ngina Otiende

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing. ~ Anthony Burgess

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader. ~ James Buchan

She was a clock, I could tell by the ticking in her wrist. (I'd secretly slipped my thumb down, to feel her pulse as we danced. It was perfectly steady and wreaking havoc with mine.) I could keep time by you, I thought. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

Change your thoughts, change your life. - LAO TZU When I was fighting depression, I remember hearing this expression and not understanding it at first. When I decided to implement it in my life, a whole new world opened up for me. Change the negative, self-loathing thoughts to positive, self-affirming ones. When you're positive about yourself and everything around you, you begin to see the world in a different light. Your life today is what you make of it. Goal: Be mindful of the tone of your thoughts. ~ Demi Lovato

Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to usurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit. ~ John Locke

His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Much of the possibility of being cheerful comes from the faculty of throwing oneself beyond oneself ... ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Ill-luck is, in nine cases out of ten, the result of taking pleasure first and duty second, instead of duty first and pleasure second. ~ Theodore T. Munger

If something

goes wrong, accuse yourself first. Don't be like Pharaoh chopping off the heads

of innocent babies, when the enemy he is looking for, Moses, was in his own house. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances. ~ Harry Browne

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments. The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer. ~ Walter Isaacson

Don't worry! Relax! We're gonna find out the reason and we're gonna win the SEO race! But to win the game, we gotta practice. Practice & patience is the key to win this game!

Okay okay!! I know you wanna know about SEO. Let's get to the point!

But first things first, lemme say this: "PASSION LEADS TO SUCCESS!". ~ Abhishek Kumar

The kiss is different than I expected. It's slow and tender, his lips soft and warm against mine. He tastes sweet, like the powdered sugar I spilt and the coffee with chicory he's always drinking. It's a perfect first kiss. ~ D.L. Hess

Love at first sight was a common romantic theme, but he could not recall reading about love at the umpteenth thousandth meeting ~ Maisie Mosco

Eventually a guy behind the hog farmer broke ranks, and stepped forward. A pragmatist, clearly. He walked to the car and lifted the hatchback and put the bags inside, one by one, first Keever's, then Chang's. ~ Lee Child

A value-added step in a process is defined by three characteristics. First, the step must be something that the customer is willing to pay for. Second, the step must directly change the form, fit, or function of something to produce a product or service. The final characteristic of a value-added step is that it is so important that it must be done right every time to successfully produce the intended product or service. ~ Robert E. Hamm Jr.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas. ~ Elizabeth Kenny

Violence always came too easy to you, that's the problem. It always felt too good. Remember the first time you trod on an ant, and with an infant stamp made the moving still, the present past? Wasn't that a sickly sweet epiphany? Such power in your feet and at your fingertips such temptation! It would take some act of charity to give all that good stuff away. You'd need to be something greater that just another invention of a spiteful god. ~ Stephen Kelman

One would expect Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who is said to have studied history, to know better and act better, but he too rejects all advice and criticism and runs around obliviously in a coach plastered with pictures of his grandmother abusing her captives, including women and children. You might imagine the bigoted Donald Trump to be riding a coach like that in a mock presidential parade in his dreams, but certainly not a twenty first century Dutch royal. I wonder if he ever considered how their Calvinist pomposity affected the psyche of black and white children. ~ Dauglas Dauglas

The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists' almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie. ~ Tim Butcher

If you just go on dreaming then it stays a dream and becomes stale and dead. But first to dream and then to do isn't that the way to make a dream come true ~ Meindert DeJong

Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.

The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobil ~ Colson Whitehead

The hunger and heat combined, a poisonous taste resembling defeat; yes, he thought, that's what it is: I've been defeated in some obscure way. By having killed the androids? By Rachael's murder of my goat? He did not know, but as he plodded along, a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certainly fatal cliffside fall - falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

At that moment the first rock - and it was not rubber or soft foam plastic - struck him in the inguinal region. And the pain, the first knowledge of absolute isolation and suffering, touched him throughout in its undisguised actual form.

He halted. And then, goaded on - the goad invisible but real, not to be challenged - he resumed his climb. Rolling upward, he thought, like the stones; I am doing what stones do, without volition. Without it meaning anything. ~ Philip K. Dick

I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse ...
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough. ~ Henry Miller

If love is an attraction,
then love may be the first.
If life is the source of all creation,
then love might be the point of action.
Let life and love live together
Let's love win over life forever. ~ Debasish Mridha

As a matter of fact, there was a period of time, especially in my first career, when that's the only one who would work out with me: my dogs. As you get better and better working out, there's no one who can keep up with you running. ~ George Foreman

I have seen the deadly effects of love first hand, and I have seen them with my second hand (the left one). ~ Jarod Kintz

They're Democrats always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment. ~ Ann Coulter

My step-dad started playing hockey in Detroit so we moved and I had to start home school. I started watching movies since I had a bunch of free time and then I was like, 'You know what? I want to give this a shot, move back to L.A., and audition.' The first show I booked was a show called Threshold with Carla Gugino and it was obviously a terrifying experience and I felt out of my comfort zone, but it made me want to keep going because it was fun. ~ Steven R. McQueen

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears ... ~ Georges Bernanos

...so I took it out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Productivity -- real, self-driven productivity -- was one of the first entrepreneurial skills I learned. It served me well when I was on my own, and it has served me even better as an employee because it requires a kind of organization and self-motivation that employees aren't necessarily incentivized to cultivate. After all, if you are superproductive, all you'll get is more work to do, right? ~ Nacie Carson

You were a mess but aside from a few evil coughs and dirty little pants and some half-moon cuts on the back of your neck, you recovered quickly enough.
I did not.
I had long, ridiculous purple nails back then. The first thing they did when I got here was tie me down and cut them off.

But it was love just the same Johnny. Believe me. For that, should I be ashamed? For wanting to protect you from the pain of living? From the pain of lovin

Always from loving. Always for loving.
Always.

Perhaps my shame should really come from my failure.
Tears just the same. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski