Sunday, January 5, 2014 – Beginning Again
Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me. ~ Walt Whitman
It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. ~ Henry David Thoreau
When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder. ~ Lao Tzu
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. ~ Anna Quindlen
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy. ~ John Galsworthy
Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason. ~ Hal Borland
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring. ~ Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow. ~ Leonardo DaVinci
We come to beginnings only at the end. ~ William Throsby Bridges
When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings. ~ Aidan Chambers
I was having trouble making ends meet, and my beginnings weren’t meeting either. ~ Allan Sherman
Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet? ~ L. M. Montgomery
Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words. ~ Terry Pratchett
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning. ~ Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
According to the Buddha’s teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him ‘What is the beginning of God?’ he would answer without hesitation ‘God has no beginning’, and he is not astonished at his own reply. ~ Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught with Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada
The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop [at the singularity]. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise. ~ Stephen Hawking
But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me – why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again. ~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
All discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else. ~ Mae West
The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves. ~ Eric Hoffer
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. ~ Pablo Picasso
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. ~ Francis Bacon
There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on. ~ Robert Byrne
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. ~ H. L. Mencken
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. ~ Albert Camus
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic. ~ Charles Darwin
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. ~ Jean-Luc Godard
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life. ~ Federico Fellini
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about. ~ Newt Gingrich
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. ~ Douglas Adams
In the beginning there was nothing. God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better. ~ Ellen DeGeneres
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. ~ Terry Pratchett
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. ~ Andre Gide
Just Above Sunset 