End And Beginning Quotes

Sincerity is the end and beginning of things; without sincerity there would be nothing. ~ Confucius

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams! Birth-less and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever. Death hath not touched it all, dead though the house of it seems! ~ Edwin Arnold

If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself ... and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning. ~ Stephen King

Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away. ~ Jonathan Franzen

I revised my earlier thought about the risks of dancing. I was looking at a sprained ankle, a few pulled muscles, and maybe a homicide charge if Sasha didn't relax before the end of the rehearsal. ~ Seanan McGuire

I studied enough to make A's and B's (mostly B's) but it was really all about beer, the occasional bottle of tequila and rock 'n' roll. Dad said I was lucky I was a smart girl or I'd be fucked. Mom warned if I didn't get smarter, I'd end up fucked. ~ Kristen Ashley

It is a wonderful thing to know and understand friendship. It is a gift, without question. I have been blessed with a handful of the most extraordinary friends, whose allegiance and devotion have, again and again in my life, lifted me up. Now, in this stiff room full of important people, I showed them Janeway's capacity for friendship. I laughed with Tuvok, I teased him, and then suddenly turned and found myself utterly vulnerable in his presence, seeking his counsel, needing his guidance. In the end, I embraced him, and put my hand to his cheek. ~ Kate Mulgrew

I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented. ~ Edmund Phelps

The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Their bedroom has always been our sanctuary. Sometimes at night we'll end up on their bed just talking. My dad will be snoring and Mia will say, "Turn around, Bobby, you're snoring," and he'll turn around and for a moment it'll be silent. Then he'll erupt into a massive snore and Luca and I will kill ourselves laughing and my dad will wake up and bark, "Get to bed!" and not even a second later he'll be snoring and we'll kill ourselves laughing again and Mia will say, "What is this? Grand Central Station? ~ Melina Marchetta

We cannot know the future. All we can do is face it bravely. We should take heed of those we love and respect. But in the end, we make every decision alone. ~ Juliet Marillier

The fact of the matter is that you can use your beauty and use your charm and be flirtatious, and you can get people interested in your beauty. But you cannot maintain that. In the end, talent is the only thing. My work is the only thing that's going to change any minds. ~ Madonna Ciccone

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk.

Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary f ~ Frank Kermode

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The craziest of all political systems, the unique dictatorship, found its earned end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English and Russians was a necessary occurrence to disrupt the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination. ~ Friedrich Kellner

I want to stand in that skycap and look out at the land below with you right there by my side - and one day with our children, if you're willing - and create our own history. I want to wake up with you in my arms and know that at the end of the day, you're right there with me, sharing our headaches and celebrating the best times in our lives. I want to grow old with you ~ Melissa Foster

The end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora. ~ Bill Mollison

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work. ~ Paula McLain

Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt. Nothing's so hard but search will find it out. ~ Robert Herrick

The hardest thing was going through different stages of weight loss. At the beginning, it was easy to take off the weight with exercise and eating less but then you reach a point where 90% of the weight loss is achieved purely through reducing your calorie intake. My goal was to lose four lbs per week and that worked well for the first few months but then things got tricky. ~ Matthew McConaughey

I embraced, I think, the process of becoming No. 1 of the world, which was long and difficult, but it's sweeter in the end. ~ Novak Djokovic

Never strive to be part of the norm. If people think you strange ... CELEBRATE. Normal people try way to hard to please others and never end up pleasing themselves. Be ABnormal. It's more fun. ~ Shelley K. Wall

The women can always choose the patriarchal models, and you end up with a Margaret Thatcher. ~ Cornel West

Still? I have never understood why helping mortals made Zeus so angry."
"Tell me," he said, "who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?"
"A happy one, of course."
"Wrong," he said. "A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred."
"But surely," I said, "you have to reward him eventually. Otherwise, he will stop offering."
"Oh, you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it's best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over."
"So this is how Olympians spend their days. Thinking of ways to make men miserable. ~ Madeline Miller

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because "God is not a what," not a "thing." That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no "what" that can be called God. There is "no such thing" as God because God is neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure "Who."* He is the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo "I am. ~ Thomas Merton

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. ~ Milan Kundera

Among the clay tablets brought back by Rassam from Ashurbanipal's library, were fragments of the Babylonian story of the Deluge. These, as translated by George Smith, aroused immense interest, which led to the desire that search be made for the missing fragments. The explorers of the Heroic Period had uncovered palaces, bas-reliefs, and statues, but had given the insignificant tablets secondary consideration. From the library chamber of Ashurbanipal's palace Rassam had extracted only those tablets which could be conveniently reached. With the power to read attained meanwhile, the tablets had become fully as important as the sculptures, if not more so. George Smith's expedition indicated, therefore, that the Modern Scientific Period of excavation had begun. Its end is not yet in sight, since its goal is the investigation of all feasible localities in the Mesopotamian valley, with the purpose of throwing all available light upon the history and life of these ancient peoples. ~ George Stephen Goodspeed

If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven't been paying attention. ~ Duncan MacMillan

In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth
only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. ~ C.S. Lewis

However often we turn to it [the Koran] at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence ... Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible - ever and anon truly sublime - Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. ~ John Updike

The virtual choir would never replace live music or a real choir, but the same sort of focus and intent and esprit de corps is evident in both, and at the end of the day it seems to me a genuine artistic expression. ~ Eric Whitacre

Actually, the substitution of the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle denotes no dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in the new way an assured pleasure coming later. But the end psychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is mirrored in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in a future life for the - voluntary or enforced - renunciation of earthly lusts is nothing but a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. In logical pursuit of this prototype, religions have been able to effect the absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future life; they have not, however, achieved a conquest of the pleasure-principle this way. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in this conquest; science, however, also offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain at the end. ~ Sigmund Freud

The interval between the beginning of 'I am' (birth or waking) and when you lose it again (death or deep sleep) is called 'time. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Don't wait for what you don't have. Use what you have, begin now and what you don't even expect will come alongside with excess of what you expect. Go, make it happen. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Everybody has asked the question ... "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ~ Frederick Douglass

It is remarkable how I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions. Is that a sign of confusion or inner dishonesty or is it a sign that we are guided without our knowing or is it both ... The reasons one gives for an action to others and to one's self are certainly inadequate. One can give a reason for everything. In the last resort one acts from a level which remains hidden from us. So one can only ask God to judge us and to forgive us ... At the end of the day I can only ask God to give a merciful judgement on today and all its decisions. It is now in his hand. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sometimes,things end even before they get started..
Pretty clear, they were not meant to happen or begin..
Cut the disappointment and look it in the face..
Even if it hurts,force a smile and lock it away..
For all the truth, there is nothing you can say.. ~ Abha Maryada Banerjee

Life will always have a different plan for you. If you don't give up, you will eventually get to your destination. But towards the end of your life, you may look back and realize that it was never really about the destination; it was the journey that counted. ~ King Samuel Benson

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done ... Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I quote the late Ed Murow ... He said: 'Look, people listen to me when they want an eyewitness account. 'They think I'm a pretty good reporter. But when it comes to my opinions, mine are not worth anymore than the guy at the end of the bar.' And I believe that about myself. ~ Dan Rather

In the beginning, God was a woman, her mother explained.

And I don't know anyone who was not born from a woman. Do you? ~ Trista Hendren

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet. ~ Peter Dinklage

If you follow the crowd, you will likely get no further than the crowd. If you walk alone, you're likely to end up in places no one has ever been before. Being an achiever is not
without its difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. The unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they'll simply say it was obvious to everyone all along. You have two choices in life. You can dissolve into the main stream, or you can choose to become an achiever and be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no else but you can be. ~ Alan Ashley-Pitt

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for. ~ Deb Caletti

The kipper was in a race for it's life, and it knew it. It used all the skill its Maker had given it and drew the creature far away from the craft, to be sacrifice in the end. It was a fitting task for the kipper. But ... there is a thing about monsters. They remember. ~ Kathy Frias

All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other bucolic Bronze-Age desert analogy might seem apt. (In Papua New Guinea, where as in most tropical climes there are no sheep, the Christians use the most valued animal of the locals and refer to the congregation as "swine." Flock, herd: what difference does it make?) Against this insane eschatology, with its death wish and its deep contempt for the life of the mind, atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it. Theism cannot coexist with this unexceptionable conclusion. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone was grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future - if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, in some way famous, not just a nobody. ~ Osho

The crew were all of them inclined to cough and sneeze, the boys particularly, and Keynes said, "We ought put them all in the water: to keep the chest warm must be the foremost concern."
Laurence agreed without thinking and was shortly appalled by the sight of Emily bathing with the rest of the young officers, innocent of both clothing and modesty.
"You must not bathe with the others," Laurence said to her urgently, having bundled her out and into a blanket.
"Mustn't I?" she said, gazing up at him damp and bewildered.
"Oh, Christ," Laurence said, under his breath. "No," he told her firmly, "it is not suitable; you are beginning to be a young lady."
"Oh," she said dismissively, "Mother has told me all about that, but I have not started bleeding yet, and anyway I would not like to go to bed with any of them," and a thoroughly routed Laurence feebly fell back on giving her some make-work, and fled to Temeraire's side. ~ Naomi Novik