Sense The Beginning Quotes & Sayings

I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it. — Debbie Millman

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. — Umberto Eco

We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole. — Haruki Murakami

A bran' new book is a beautiful thing, all promise and fresh pages, the neatly squared spine, the brisk sense of a journey beginning. But a well-worn book also has its pleasures, the soft caress and give of the paper's edges, the comfort, like an old shawl, of an oft-read story. — Lewis Buzbee

AmYou know, the spark. It could be as simple as a meeting of eyes or as intimate as knuckles skimming down flesh, but one thing it was unmistakable. No denying it once you'd felt it and no sense in trying to conjure one up if it wasn't there from the beginning. Sparks are beginnings, leading to middles of fireworks, finishing like blasts of dynamite. So, long story short, there were no sparks — Nicole Williams

And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think ... Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. — Samuel Beckett

And the voice spoke even more deliberately: ' ... but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'
And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Confronting climate change is, in the long run, one of the greatest challenges that we face, and you can see this duty or responsibility laid down in scriptures, clearly, beginning in Genesis. And Muslim-majority countries are among the most vulnerable. Our response to this challenge ought to be rooted in a sense of stewardship of Earth. And for me and for many of us here today, that responsibility comes from God. — John F. Kerry

It is by translating your fine sense of aspiration into actual lofty deeds that you grow toward your ideal. Link your lofty thoughts to earnest, active effort, and good results will inevitably follow. The great things you intend to do some time must have a beginning if they are ever to be done, so begin something worthwhile today. — Grenville Kleiser

We are beginning to learn that an empathic moment requires both intimate engagement and a measure of detachment. If our feelings completely spill over into another's feelings or their feelings overwhelm our psyche, we lose a sense of self and the ability to imagine the other as if they were us. Empathy is a difficult balancing act. One has to be open to experiencing another's plight as if it were one's own but not be engulfed by it, at the expense of drowning out the self's ability to be a unique and separate being. Empathy requires a porous boundary between I and thou that allows the identity of two beings to mingle in a shared mental space.
- The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis — Jeremy Rifkin

Knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning ... and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant "make love to me") it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. — John Fowles

Beginning to sense his call to preach boldly in dangerous situations even though he was young and slight, the author agreed to go only if God would give him a particular sense of His presence. The next morning, the author says it was as if God took out his human eyes and replaced them with God's own because he saw other people so much more vividly. — K.P. Yohannan

When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense. — Kahlil Gibran

Happiness, I think, has to come in the beginning, truly, from feeling a sense of well-being within yourself. To me it's that incredible sense of belonging and peace within your own self and heart that really is joy. — Goldie Hawn

When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves. — Henri Bergson

People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them
dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end
dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.
You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms ... there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men. — Lydia Millet

It is always wise, particularly in the beginning, to balance your new intuitive and psychic understandings with good old common sense. A good psychic perception follows your common sense. — Frederick Lenz

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness ... Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition. — Norman Cousins

What I remember most clearly is how it felt. I'd just finished painting a red fire engine-like the one I often walked past near my grandparents' house. Suddenly the teachers, whose names I've long forgotten, closed in on my desk. They seemed unusually impressed, and my still dripping fire engine was immediately and ceremoniously pinned up. I don't know what they might have said, but their unexpected attention and having something I'd made given a place of honor on the wall created an overwhelming and totally unfamiliar sense of pride inside me. I loved that feeling, and I wanted to feel it again and again. That desire, I suppose, was the beginning of my career.
I have no idea where my fire engine painting ended up, but I never forgot the basic layout. Several decades later, it served as the inspiration for this sketch for an illustration in a book called Why the chicken crossed the Road. — David Macaulay

Christianity in its true sense puts an end to the State. It was so understood from its very beginning, and for that Christ was crucified. — Leo Tolstoy

Lennon's was one of the first voices I emulated when I began to sing. When we held tryouts in my pal's dad's living room for the singer in our band, I sang a Beatles song that Lennon sang. There is something about the timbre of his voice, something that it conveys, that still gets to me. The quality and the poetry of his lyrics. The wry sense of humor. And the boyishness, in the beginning. There are a great many things that touch me about him ... Lennon was, to put it in his own words, a 'working-class hero.' — Don Henley

The beautiful thing is that, when someone who has chronic pain reaches the point of acceptance, it doesn't merely bring a new sense of peace. Acceptance also creates a floor to build upon. It marks the beginning of an uphill climb, not to the old life, but to a new one that may be just as satisfying. Hal — Lynn R. Webster

Overall, the work of rebuilding and transforming government for the digital age is only just beginning. Governments remain organized according to political and bureaucratic imperatives, not according to what makes the most sense to citizens. — Andrew Leigh

You read and read the material and after you've read the twentieth article you can't make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that's just too much. Words,' he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, 'are beginning to lose their meanings.' The — Margaret Atwood

Common sense told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons ... but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. — Ronald Reagan

School and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies to hook you up with a Wish. "I got it in exchange for the leg," he explained. There was all this light on his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably. "Now, I'm not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it wouldn't make sense to meet him without the girl who introduced me to his book." "It definitely wouldn't," I said. "So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said Amsterdam is lovely in the beginning of May. They proposed — John Green

We what? Walk around the city seven times in seven days and blow our trumpets? Forgive me, my Commander, but what is that going to do, kill them with laughter?" The other commanders snickered. Joshua chose not to be angry. He thought it was rather silly himself. "Our god has quite a sense of humor, does he not? But nevertheless, he did tell me that is what we should do. So, unless you have a better idea than Yahweh, Salmon, I suggest we obey him and see his salvation." Salmon was duly chastised. "Forgive my offense, commander." Joshua said with a smile, "You are forgiven, Salmon. You are too good of a spy." Caleb was impressed with Joshua's temperament. His sense of holiness would normally be offended at remarks like that. Perhaps he was beginning to appreciate Yahweh's sense of humor after all. Joshua ended his remarks, "And remember, Commanders, avoid the home with the scarlet rope. Caleb and Salmon, you will be responsible for Rahab's deliverance. — Brian Godawa

Since the very beginning, Emeril's had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him. — Anthony Bourdain

But this is one of the rewards of reading the Old Testament regularly. You keep on discovering more and more what a tissue of quotations from it the New Testament is; how constantly our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued, refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom He introduced a novelty...The Light which has lightened every man from the beginning may shine more clearly but cannot change. The Origin cannot suddenly start being, in the popular sense of the word, "original". — C.S. Lewis

Carter's renowned 1979 "malaise speech" [ ... ] is little remembered for what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation's dire energy future. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977
never" [ ... ] Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power, and alternative fuel, and [ ... ] "a bold conservation program" where "every act of energy conservation ... is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism. — Rachel Maddow

But ought we to give him up? 'I should say, certainly not.' Then I fear that I must lay hands on my father Parmenides; but do not call me a parricide; for there is no way out of the difficulty except to show that in some sense not-being is; and if this is not admitted, no one can speak of falsehood, or false opinion, or imitation, without falling into a contradiction. You observe how unwilling I am to undertake the task; for I know that I am exposing myself to the charge of inconsistency in asserting the being of not-being. But if I am to make the attempt, I think that I had better begin at the beginning. — Plato

I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn't a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education. P 99 — Lance Armstrong

Can anyone be a father without beginning to be one? Yes, one who did not begin his existence. What begins to exist begins to be a father - God the Father did not begin at all. He is Father in the true sense, because He is not a son as well. Just as the Son is son in the true sense, because He is not a father as well. In our case, the word 'father' cannot be truly appropriate, because we must be fathers and sons ... — Gregory Of Nazianzus

I'm not tormenting myself. I learned long ago that in order to heal my wounds, I must have the courage to face up to them. I also learned to forgive myself and correct my mistakes. However, ever since I started out on this journey, I've had a sense of being confronted by a vast jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which are only just beginning to revealed, pieces of love, hate, sacrifice, forgiveness, joy, and grief. — Paulo Coelho

I saw it in his eyes, first - the beginning of the end, the beginning of things to come. The blackest night, they cut into me, paralyzing my trembling body. Not even the gods could sense my fear now, for the celebration of the monsters who'd claimed me drowned out all perception of pain. It was all-powerful, all-knowing, the definition of infinite, an overwhelming possession that consumed every inch of my being. — Rachael Wade

At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. "You must never write history," Hibbert said, "until you can hear the people speak." He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn't have a sense of how people spoke, you didn't know them well enough, and so you couldn't - you shouldn't - tell their story. — Salman Rushdie

Beginning with sin instead of creation is like trying to read a book by opening it in the middle: You don't know the characters and can't make sense of the plot. — Nancy Pearcey

The feeling of cold grayness was everywhere around me-a sense of resignation. There had been no talk of rehabilitation, of cure, of someday sending these people out into the world again. No one had spoken of hope. The feeling was of living death-or worse, of never having been fully alive and knowing. Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day. — Daniel Keyes

Falling in love is the beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion; and in it's larger sense is the one thing in life worth doing. — Elbert Hubbard

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought ... The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am learning the Language of the World, and everything in the world is beginning to make sense to me ... even the flight of the hawks, he — Paulo Coelho

The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being. — Luce Irigaray

None of this makes any sense."
"I'm beginning to think I should make that the title of my autobiography. — Rachel Hawkins

We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered. — C.S. Lewis

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. — Oscar Romero

Our collective participation on the Jan25 is the beginning of the end
the end of silence, acceptance, and submission to all that is happening in our country, and the beginning of a new page of coming forward and demanding our rights. Jan25 is not a revolution in the sense of a coup, but rather a revolution against our government to let them know that we have taken interest in one another's problems and that we shall reclaim all our rights and will not be silent anymore. — Wael Ghonim

With the e-reader, the whole book was on
the same virtual page. One could not feel the depth of the pages on the left side increase as those of the right side diminished, the
gradual progression from beginning to middle to end, the sense of where one stood in the journey of the story. — Daniel Seltzer

I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair ... Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live - that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak. — Oscar Wilde

The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The fact was, as a story - even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean - the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning. I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we're in. The — Andrew Klavan

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections. — Louise Erdrich

The Greeks believe the Fates are three sisters: one is Order, who spins out the linear thread of a life from the beginning; another is Irony, who gently cocks up the thread, marking it with some peculiar sense of balance, like justice, only blind drunk with a scale that's been bunged into the street so it never quite settles; and the third, Inevitability, simply sits in the corner taking notes and criticizing the other two for being shameless slags until she cuts life's thread, leaving everyone miffed at the timing. — Christopher Moore

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.
I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. — Gregory Bateson

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style. — Jorge Luis Borges

From the first day we hid the woman within the man, so that at the right time we could remove her from within him. We didn't create man to live alone; she was purposed from the beginning. By taking her out of him, he birthed her in a sense. We created a circle of relationship, like our own, but for humans. She, out of him, and now all the males, including me, birthed through her, and all originating, or birthed, from God. — Wm. Paul Young

An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love. — Louis Sullivan

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I've been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival ... how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden. — Diane Ackerman

He might have mocked himself if he hadn't been tired of always mocking at what others took seriously. It was easier to mock, of course, but other people refrained, and not always because they lacked the imagination or sense of humor required to mock. Sometimes they refrained because they dared to long for something that was not easily grasped, something that might slip away if one did not pay it the proper respect - prayerful respect, the sort that moved one to remove one's hat by the side of a grave, or to bow one's head to soldiers marching off to war, even while damning the fat MPs that sent them to die. Life was not all for mockery. Nor was laughter. But it was harder to spot the prayerful moments when they called for laughter instead of tears. Tears spelled an end. Laughter could spell a beginning. — Meredith Duran

Winter solstice: the darkest time of the year. No sooner has he woken up in the morning than he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself - not really here, but not anywhere else either. A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls. He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought: a darkness in the bones. — Paul Auster

Death is believed to be inauspicious in some foreign lands to the west of us; to them it signifies the end of everything. But nothing ever really dies. No material can ever truly escape the universe. It just changes form. In that sense, death is actually also the beginning of regeneration; the old form dies and a new form is born. If the south is the direction of death, then it is also the direction of regeneration. — Amish Tripathi

I, for one, thought this would be something good for Settlers to know from the get-go. With so much risk, why did SA feel the consequences of exposure were something to be concealed until there was not choice but to drag people like Monica and me into their secret beige meeting room and scare us half to death after we'd screwed up? It made about as much sense as extremely conservative parents not telling their daughters about the consequences of sex until after they were already pregnant. Shutting the barn door after the horse was loose, much?
But then, I was beginning to think SA wasn't nearly as smart as they believed themselves to be. Our remaining undiscovered for so long seemed due more to humanity's tendency not to see things they didn't want to see, rather than cleverness on the part of Settler's Affairs. — Stacey Jay

At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary. — Amit Chaudhuri

The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police). — Alain De Botton

These moments of intoxication, when we defy everything, when, the anchor raised, we go merrily toward the abyss, with no more thought for the inevitable fall than for the limits given in the beginning, are the only ones when we are completely free of the ground (of laws) ...
Nothing exists that doesn't have this senseless sense - common to flames, dreams, uncontrollable laughter - in those moments when consumption accelerates, beyond the desire to endure. Even utter senselessness ultimately is always this sense made of the negation of all the others. (Isn't this sense basically that of each particular being who, as such, is the senselessness of all the others, but only if he doesn't care a damn about enduring - and thought (philosophy) is at the limit of this conflagration, like a candle blown out at the limit of a flame.) — Georges Bataille

For some people, the beginning is a time of complete chaos. You see bits and pieces of what is before you. You have a sense of what it is you must set out to do. But nothing will form yet. When you sit down to write or paint or form movement, it's like stepping over a cliff or into a dense fog. All you can do is trust that this impending masterpiece is going to somehow manifest itself as you work. But you do know that there is something specific ahead, and you feel the excitement of that. — Vinita Hampton Wright

Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see. — Georg Simmel

The real beginning of influence comes as others sense you are being influenced by them
when they feel understood by you
that you have listened deeply and sincerely, and that you are open. — Stephen Cove

Right Relationship With Life Itself Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, said in his very wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual desire. It drains away our deepest and true desire, that inner flow and life force which makes us "long and pant for running streams" (Psalm 42). Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object. It has been a frequent experience of mine to find that many people in recovery often have a unique and very acute spiritual sense; more than most people, I would say. It just got frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need and desire took off before boundaries, strong identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.2 — Richard Rohr

Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it's a bit like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire themselves admiring the sunset. — D. A. Carson

I admit at the beginning that 'popular religion,' 'demotic religion,' the pieties of the common folk, tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, be it in syncretizing saints with old, half-forgotten pagan godlings, or in preferring the nasal whine and the revivalist shoutin' to solid sense and learning, regarding intellect as positively inimical to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But it is in American religious life, especially Protestant American religious life, that things bottom out completely. — Markham Shaw Pyle

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed
he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog. — Graham Greene

Every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures. — Ellen Glasgow

The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-datum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives. — J.L. Austin

It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.
More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be? — Austin Grossman

I think if you had to map that out at the beginning and you said, "Right, sit down, this is what you're going to be doing," you'd probably freak out. But I'm someone who really enjoys not being himself. So if you consider that, then it all sort of makes sense. — Eric Bana

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself. — Immanuel Kant

He turns the pages from right to left. He begins at the beginning and ends at the end. This makes a quirky sense to me - but Mikio and I are definitely in the minority here. And how can we two be right? It would make so many others wrong. Water moves upward. It seeks the highest level. What did you expect? Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire. But that's all right. Gravity still pins us to the planet. — Martin Amis

Whales, for example, also navigate with sound, but they're now beginning to be beached because the ocean is getting too noisy. Weird things like that. I mean this is very real. Like, if you look at the satellites in the sky at night you know it's an eerie sense of we're ... — DJ Spooky

We don't know the end from the beginning the way that God does. So when a child dies, sure that is incredibly difficult, and when you are the parent, there is almost nothing anybody can say to you that makes any sense. — Benjamin Carson

There is something charming and peculiar about a beginning. You feel it, like the change of seasons, from winter to spring, from spring to summer. You feel it; the new blood pumping inside your veins. You feel it; a thousand butterflies fluttering around your fingers to help you fly. You feel it; on your lips, when you smile at the absurdities of life that suddenly make perfect sense.
You smile... Because in every beginning, there is a rebirth. Because in every beginning, there is a layer of you that you just discovered. A layer you forgot was buried in you all this time. You smile because you are reminded of the immensity of fate. You smile because suddenly you feel so small and you like it.
So let's begin my dear. This life is beautiful. — Malak El Halabi

The fire of love or fire of knowledge creates unpleasantness or a sense of longing in the beginning, but it moves on to the blossoming of bliss, the blossoming of fullness. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

The idea that rhythm is intrinsically human - not just primitive - that we all have hearts that beat at a steady rate and don't stop ... reminds me of life itself. In that sense my music is like certain popular music where the rhythm drives from beginning to end. — Michael Torke

Birth is but the beginning of a trajectory to death; for all their love, parents cannot halt it and in a sense have "given us to death" merely by giving us birth. — Anonymous

[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion. — Edward Carpenter

The procrastination, the laziness, the halfhearted attempts, the going through the motions - all indicate that the old story isn't motivating you anymore. What once made sense, makes sense no longer. You are beginning to withdraw from that world. Society does its best to persuade you to resist that withdrawal, which, when resisted, is called depression. — Charles Eisenstein

Aging offers certain rewards that youth cannot. It represents the culmination of our efforts in building self-knowledge, families, friendships, careers, and the sense of self that comes from facing whatever adversity we may have encountered. Aging is to be honored. Youth certainly has its own set of rewards, but to dwell on them to the exclusion of those that come later in life causes a stagnation of the self. It keeps us from experiencing an appreciation of living an entire (ital) life, not just the beginning. When we're really old we will likely measure our lives by how well we loved, how well we were loved, and by what we created, whether that be family, work, art, or friendships. Even if we have chosen to have them, we will probably not measure our lives collagen injection by collagen injection. — Joyce T. McFadden

I'm beginning to sense a theme," Mircea said, tossing his suit coat over a buckskin-covered chair. A moose head with huge, outspread antlers loomed over it, its bright glass eyes looking oddly lifelike in the low light. Mircea took in the room, his expression slightly repulsed yet fascinated. "I believe there is only one thing to say at this point."
What's that?"
Yee haw," he said gravely, and took me down like a rodeo calf. — Karen Chance

Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game. — Tatjana Soli

Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all. — Anita Shreve

I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning. — Beth Pattillo

I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I ... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more ... never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then. — Michael Cunningham

Experience of the phenomenal capacity of our birthing body can give us an enduring sense of our own power as women. Birth is the beginning of life; the beginning of mothering, and of fathering. We all deserve a good beginning. — Sarah J. Buckley

Now your return has started to be real. I've always been convinced that until you were in the door that you'd never get here and have always felt I'd never see you again when I saw you off, which is why I wept. And I always used to half dread your coming, because it meant the beginning of your going away and every moment that you were here seemed terribly fraught somehow, painful... I've never had such a sense of the rush of time, and yet the weeks that you were here seemed very, very long, and when I was alone again, it seemed as if I'd been away for a year. Strange... And now it will be different - there'll be more ease between us, I think... Well, I wonder what you think about all this... I used to doubt whether you knew anything about me... but perhaps now I think you've known everything all along. Didn't think you were as wise as you are now, but your perfect knowledge of yourself and everything around you shook me up and astounded me. — Joyce Johnson

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism. — Russell Smith

Elephants can sense danger. They're able to detect an approaching tsunami or earthquake before it hits. Unfortunately, Jack did not have this talent. The day his life was turned completely upside down, he was caught unaware. — Jennifer Richard Jacobson

Well, your whole life is like a checkerboard and there's a sense that you get, especially looking back on it, that you begin to realize and gain awareness that there's something else moving all of these pieces around in your life, and that was really true for me right from the very beginning. — Wayne Dyer

The expression, 'I did it of my own free will' is perfectly correct when it is understood to mean 'I did it because I wanted to; nothing compelled or caused me to do it since I could have acted otherwise had I desired.' This expression was necessarily misinterpreted because of the general ignorance that prevailed for although it is correct in the sense that a person did something because he wanted to, this in no way indicates that his will is free. In fact I shall use the expression 'of my own free will' frequently myself which only means 'of my own desire.' Are you beginning to see how words have deceived everyone? — Seymour Lessans

For once in his life, Bailey felt like he couldn't keep up. He was blaming the long week and the relaxed interactions with Dan that had thrown him off his game, but still. The man was clearly not making any sense. First he was making a move on Bailey, and then he was probing about his stupid crush on John, and then he was offering to have rebound sex (not that Bailey had "bounced" against John, or however the analogy went; sports were definitely not his thing). And now Dan wanted to brainstorm seduction tactics so he could "get" John.

"Who the hell are you?" Baily asked, mystified.

Just like in the beginning, Dan gave hime one of those million-dollar smiles. "I'm the man who is going to get you a boyfriend. — Alix Bekins

If your monetary wealth accumulates naturally and spontaneously, then let it accumulate, but do not lean on it for support. You may take its support and feel a sense of relief, but there is no telling when that support will move away. Therefore, conduct yourself with caution from the beginning so that you are not shaken up during time of painful experiences. — Dada Bhagwan