Starting Fresh

Sunday, January 3, 2016 – Starting Fresh

The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings. ~ Dave Weinbaum

Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. ~ Thomas Mann

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

Beginnings are always messy. ~ John Galsworthy

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

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. ~ Lewis Carroll

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. ~ T. S. Eliot

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set. ~ Lyn Yutang

I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we’re all cowards. ~ Alberto Salazar

There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on. ~ Robert Byrne

The beginning of thought is in disagreement, not only with others but also with ourselves. ~ Eric Hoffer

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. ~ Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

You’re searching, Joe, for things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings – there are no such things. There are only middles. ~ Robert Frost, Mountain Interval

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. ~ Steven Spielberg

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

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. ~ Blaise Pascal

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. ~ Jackson Pollock

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

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

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

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. ~ Edward Gibbon

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time. ~ Emma Goldman

The beginning is always today. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. ~ Gertrude Stein

A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century. ~ David Hume

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

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere. ~ Peter Robert Fleming

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

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

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

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 snowplow 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

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

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

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. ~ Andre Gide