Quotes & Sayings About The Beginning Of The Earth

Every morning is a fresh beginning. Every day is the world made new. Today is a new day. Today is my world made new. I have lived all my life up to this moment, to come to this day. This moment - this day - is as good as any moment in all eternity. I shall make of this day - each moment of this day - a heaven on earth. This is my day of opportunity. — Dan Custer

Earth as we know it came into being through its four great components: land, water, air, and life, all interacting in the light and energy of the sun. Although there was a sequence in the formation of the land sphere, the atmosphere, the water sphere, and the life sphere, these have so interacted with one another in the shaping of the Earth that we must somehow think of these as all present to one another and interacting from the beginning. — Thomas Berry

I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself. — C.S. Lewis

By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.
[...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth. — Elaine Pagels

Despite what you've read, your sadness is not beautiful. No one will see you in the bookstore, curled up with your Bukowski, and want to save you.
Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare,
for an end to your sadness in Keats.
He coughed up his lungs at 25, and flowery words cannot conceal a life barely lived.
Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world.
Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth.
Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor. — Emily Palermo

Human releases of carbon dioxide are almost certainly happening faster than any natural carbon release since the beginning of life on Earth. — Mark Lynas

In the beginning God created a the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit b of God was moving over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, "Let there be light"; — Anonymous

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

Nearly all ancient peoples worshiped sex in some form and ritual, and not the lowest people but the highest expressed their worship most completely [ ... ]. The sexual character and functions of primitive deities were held in high regard, not through any obscenity of mind, but through a passion for fertility in women and in the earth. Certain animals, like the bull and the snake, were worshiped as apparently possessing or symbolizing in a high degree the divine power of reproduction.
The snake in the story of Eden is doubtless a phallic symbol, representing sex as the origin of evil, suggesting sexual awakening as the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps insinuating a certain proverbial connection between mental innocence and bliss. — Will Durant

You see how people get through their misfortunes, if they have but a heart to bear up against them, and do nothing that can lie on their conscience afterwards; and how suddenly one comes to be happy, just when one is beginning to think one never is to be happy again! ... who would have thought we should ever know what it is to be happy! Yet here we are all abroad once more! All at liberty! And may run, if we will, straight forward, from one end of the earth to the other, and back again without being stopped! May fly in the sea, or swim in the sky, or tumble over head and heels into the moon! For remember, my good friends, we have no lead in our consciences to keep us down! — Ann Radcliffe

Is there any finer phrase in the English language than Midsummer Day? There are no words to touch it for conjuring. It is the beginning of blooming roses and ripening corn, of days that stretch on, reaching for midnight until the spangled blue velvet of night descends and beginning again before cockcrow, when the dew jewels the grass like diamonds scattered while the earth slumbers. I, of course, expected rain. Not just rain, but torrential, heaving, biblical rain - the sort to set arks afloat. Everything else had gone awry, why not that? But when I awoke on Midsummer Day, the sun greeted me cordially, coaxing the dew from the grass and the early roses as a light breeze wafted the scent of charred chimney over the gardens. I stood at the window and breathed in deeply all the scents of summer, fresh grass and carp ponds and blossoming herb knots until the whole of it mingled in my head and made me dizzy. A bee floated lazily in the window and out again as if beckoning me to follow. — Deanna Raybourn

When you head on out to the Moon, in very short order, and you get a chance to look back at the Earth, that horizon slowly curves around in upon himself, and all of sudden you're looking at something that is very strange, but yet is very, very familiar, because you're beginning to see the Earth evolve. — Eugene Cernan

I've always been interested, - if you look back at my work from the beginning, really - I've always been interested in the idea of the artificial landscape. Reforming the landscape. Architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface. We reshape the earth's surface, from architecture to paving streets, to parking lots and buildings that are really reforming the surface of the earth. Reforming nature, taking over what we find. And we're mushing it around and remaking a new earth - or, what we used to call Terra Nova. — Lebbeus Woods

I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes
epic on epic, Iliad on Iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself ... But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. — G.K. Chesterton

Love is an exchange of gifts,' Saint Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow. — Dorothy Day

I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life. — Lord Kelvin

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.
When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center. — Alice Walker

The first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony/settlement, I call it a 'permanence'. — Buzz Aldrin

Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward - pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found that what had already been found in abundance on Earth - a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remain terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom. — Kurt Vonnegut

I spent a good part of the nineties roaming the Earth writing about conflict. It was very grueling. I was beginning to find this way of life was, wow, addictive and deeply meaningful. — Janine Di Giovanni

If we had made it clear from the very beginning that we were not going to tolerate another nuclear power on the face of the earth, and had done it in Korea, where we could have accomplished it militarily, if necessary, I would put a stop to it and would have put a stop to it there. — Lawrence Eagleburger

The theory of the earth is the science which describes and explains changes that the terrestrial globe has undergone from its beginning until today, and which allows the prediction of those it shall undergo in the future. The only way to understand these changes and their causes is to study the present-day state of the globe in order to gradually reconstruct its earlier stages, and to develop probable hypotheses on its future state. Therefore, the present state of the earth is the only solid base on which the theory can rely. — Horace-Benedict De Saussure

I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fins and fronds, tentacles and wings, colourful and transparent, tiny and huge, coming and going. There is nothing the ocean has not seen — Sally Andrew

I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. — Jo Walton

Walter Wagner, the man who had gone to court to stop the Large Hadron Collider from beginning operations. A serious charge had been leveled: the LHC was a hazard to the very existence of life on earth. JO: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances the world is going to be destroyed? Is it one in a million, one in a billion? WW: Well, the best we can say right now is about a one-in-two chance. JO: Hold on a second. It's ... fifty-fifty? WW: Yeah, fifty-fifty ... If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen, or it's going to not happen, and, so, the best guess is one in two. JO: I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter. — Sean Carroll

Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it could ever have escaped you. The
answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions,
there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come notas the climax of creation
but as a physical reaction to the environment.
- Of Human Bondage - — W. Somerset Maugham

It's natural to be skeptical of a story like Noah. However, the greatest miracle in the Bible is not Noah and the flood. The greatest miracle in the Bible is recorded in the first verse: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." If that miracle is true, then every miracle in the Bible is at least possible (including Noah's Ark). If God created the universe, then He can do whatever He wants inside it. — Frank Turek

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. — T. S. Eliot

Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans
or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity
they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth
the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given
far behind them in the past. — Savitri Devi

One of the most remarkable of these hymns is that addressed to the Unknown God. The poet says: "In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. As soon as he was born he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven." The hymn consists of ten stanzas, in which the Deity is celebrated as the maker of the snowy mountains, the sea and the distant river, who made fast the awful heaven, He who alone is God above all gods, before whom heaven and earth stand trembling in their mind. Each stanza concludes with the refrain, "Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?" We have in this hymn a most sublime conception of the Supreme Being, and while there are many Vedic hymns whose tone is pantheistic and seems to imply that the wild forces of nature are Gods who rule the world, this hymn to the Unknown God is as purely monotheistic as a psalm of David, and shows a spirit of religious awe as profound as any we find in the Hebrew Scriptures. — Epiphanius Wilson

Life on earth matters not because it's the only life we have, but precisely because it isn't - it's the beginning of a life that will continue without end. — Randy Alcorn

Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parcel of that unhappy distinction between soul and body which resulted from the fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. — C.S. Lewis

In my view, Roman Catholicism is not even a faith, but is decidedly a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and in it everything, beginning with faith, is subordinated to that idea. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne, and took up the sword; ever since then it has all gone like that, except that to the sword they've added lies, slyness, deception, fanaticism, superstition and evil-doing, and played with the people's most sacred, truthful, simple, fiery emotions, exchanging everything, everything for money, for base, earthly power. And isn't that the teaching of the Antichrist? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The first verses establish an immediate correspondence with what Revelation was later to recount about the creation of humankind: "He [God] taught Adam the names of all things."8 Reason, intelligence, language, and writing will grant people the qualities required to enable them to be God's khalifahs (vicegerents) on earth, and from the very beginning, Quranic Revelation allies recognition of the Creator to knowledge and science, thus echoing the origin of creation itself.9 — Tariq Ramadan

And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more! — Georges Bernanos

I am beginning to see the fallacy in the Western world's take on dying. Too often we are taught that this one life is all there is and when it ends, that's it. Or, instead of once again returning to a loving God who welcomes us back Home with open arms, we are told that when we die we must stand in front of a stern and unforgiving deity who sits on a throne and looks at every mistake we have ever made, deciding if we are good enough to enter heaven. And, if we do make it past that stringent test, we certainly aren't able to visit our friends and family still living. No wonder so many of us are afraid of death. I also find it fascinating that most religions believe in angels or wise ascended souls who brought messages to certain people on earth (Moses and Noah, for example) thousands of years ago, but deny that such an occurrence can happen now. What, did God just decide not to talk to us anymore? — Donna Visocky

More and more people are beginning to feel that there must be another way of thinking, perceiving, and acting. And perhaps the beginning of another way of looking at the world is to re-evaluate all of our beliefs. It is, after all, our beliefs that determine what we are, experience, and expect. When we are willing to take a new look at our own beliefs, we then have an opportunity to begin rediscovering who and what we are and to redetermine our true purpose on Earth. — Gerald Jampolsky

Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth. — Gloria Steinem

President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln's phrase, referred to America as 'the last, best hope of man on Earth.' But this last, best hope is beginning to fade. — Edwin Meese

Jesus Christ is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. In the Gospels he walks in human form upon the earth, and accomplishes the work of redemption. — Philip Schaff

How he died hadn't been funny, Newt thought.
"It's all right, though," Augustus said. "It's mostly bones we're riding over anyway. Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains. Buffalo and other critters too. And the Indians have been here forever; their bones are down there in the earth. I'm told that over in the Old Country you can't dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It's interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it's just fellow creatures, it's nothing to shy from. — Larry McMurtry

The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course - it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming. — Gerda Lerner

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end. — H.G.Wells

I grew up then, into this life of jazz, and fell immediately into the state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my thoughts. It seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident has brought us to where we could fly in her face. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper and presently, it's the salt of the Earth. If any one can find lesson in that, let him stand forth. Am I crazy trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge towards truth? Trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable? — F Scott Fitzgerald

The end is brother to the beginning. He who is sent out is obliged to return. No one may resist what must come to pass. No individual may gainsay that which all humans must suffer. A man shall return what he has borrowed. All humans are strangers on this Earth. They must pass from something to nothing. Every man's life runs along on fast feet: this moment, living; in the turning of a hand, dead. To briefly conclude: every human owes the debt of death and has inherited death. If you weep for your wife's youth, you are wrong to do so; as soon as a human has life, so soon is he old enough to die. — Johannes Von Saaz

In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want. — Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big Bang; the Darwinian epic of the evolution of life on Earth; and now the story we are just beginning to learn how to tell... — Daniel C. Dennett

The Christian message does not begin with "accept Christ as your Savior"; it begins with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". The Bible teaches that God is the sole source of the entire created order. No other gods compare with Him; no natural forces exist on their own; nothing receives its nature or existence from another source. Thus, His Word, or laws, or creation ordinances give the world its order and structure. God's creative world is the source of the laws of physical nature (natural sciences), human nature (ethics, politics, economics, aesthetics) and even logic. That's why Psalm 119:91 says, "all things are your servants". There is no philosophically or spiritually neutral subject matter. — Nancy Pearcey

I read to him from his mother's Bible the first line of Genesis: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' It says nothing about hell, Tom. That came later with the membership drive. — Poe Ballantine

Limitless and immortal, the waters are the beginning and end of all things on earth. — Heinrich Zimmer

Galileo had already made a significant beginning toward a knowledge of the law of motion. He discovered the law of inertia and the law of bodies falling freely in the gravitational field of the earth. — Albert Einstein

How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending,
the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the history of physics, there have been three great revolutions in thought that first seemed absurd yet proved to be true. The first proposed that the earth, instead of being stationary, was moving around at a great and variable speed in a universe that is much bigger than it appears to our immediate perception. That proposal, I believe, was first made by Aristarchos two millenia ago ... Remarkably enough, the name Aristarchos in Greek means best beginning. — Edward Teller

I kiss her again just to keep my mouth from admitting that it was. The beginning of the end. The very start of the saddest goodbye in history. Because after tonight, she'll walk away from me and go back to him, holding a piece of me in the palm of her hand. And whenever I look up at the sky at night, wondering where she is, if she's happy, if Evan laughs at her corny jokes or smiles whenever she does, that empty space left behind within me will ache with remembrance. Because her light once filled it. She filled me in a way that nobody on this Earth could. And I'll never feel whole again. — S.L. Jennings

If leaders in the space program had at its beginning in the 1940s, pointed out the benefits to people on earth rather than emphasizing the search for proof of evolution in space, the program would have saved $100 billion in tax money and achieved greater results. — Walter Lang

What several decades of research has revealed about Earth's location within the vastness of the cosmos can be summed up in this statement: the ideal place for any kind of life as we know it turns out to be a solar system like ours, within a galaxy like the Milky Way, within a supercluster of galaxies like the Virgo supercluster, within a super-supercluster like the Laniakea super-supercluser. In other words we happen to live in the best, perhaps the one and only, neighborhood that allows not only for physical life's existence but also for it's enduring survival. — Hugh Ross

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin. — Seamus Heaney

And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable - all is meaningful; nothing is small - all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, no too small.
And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again. — Olive Schreiner

Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather an inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereal breath for its dayly refreshment and vitall ferment and transpires again grosses exhalations. And, according to the condition of all other things living, ought to have its time of beginning, youth, old age and perishing. — Isaac Newton

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.-Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth. — Anna Quindlen

When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power ... Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life! — Malcolm Muggeridge

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fear of memories. — Mahmoud Darwish

This dog is mine," said those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth. — Blaise Pascal

For even if the Word in His immeasurable essence united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that He was confined therein. Here is something marvellous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, He willed to be borne in the virgin's womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet He continuously filled the world even as He had done from the beginning. — John Calvin

But the whole vital process of the earth takes place so gradually and in periods of time which are so immense compared with the length of our life, that these changes are not observed, and before their course can be recorded from beginning to end whole nations perish and are destroyed. — Aristotle.

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

The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper.
The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. — A.S. Byatt

What is faith? It is a memory. Of a time when all was perfect in the world. When there was no fear and no judgment and no death. It is a memory of a time before we were born, a beacon to guide us back from the end to the beginning, to the memory of where we came from. It is a memory of a promise made before the earth was formed, before the stars glittered in the primordial sea. A promise that says that we will remember what we have learned on this journey so that we may return full circle, the same and yet different. Older. Wiser. Filled with compassion for others. And for ourselves. What is faith? It is the memory of love. — Kamran Pasha

The process of dying begins with the dissolution of the elements within the body. It has eight stages, beginning with the dissolution of the earth element, then the water, fire and windelements. The color: appearance of a white vision, increase of the red element, black near-attainment, and finally the clear light of death. — Dalai Lama

But unvented - ahh! One un-vents something; one unearths it; one digs it up, one runs it down in whatever recesses of the eternal consciousness it has gone to ground. I very much doubt if anything is really new when one works in the prehistoric medium of wool with needles. The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams - it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind's history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive. — Elizabeth Zimmermann

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

I would like to say, historically, from the very beginning, our people have time and again expressed the need for people to live in harmony with the creator, the mother earth, fellow man, and respect our brother's vision. In the past and the present, we have been respon-sible for the greatest gains; cultivated foods and medicines; democratic government, and many other areas of concern. — Leonard Peltier

It seems like in the beginning of my flight, the space dreams were rare. And now, almost 150 days into it, the Earth dreams are more of the rare ones. — Scott Kelly

I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the soul by the trying to do one's duty or the patient enduring of having somebody else's duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them wonder at the meanness of the day just past, at the worthlessness of the things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than a little while alone at night with the stars. What are perfunctory bedroom prayers hurried through in an atmosphere of blankets, to this deep abasement of the spirit before the majesty of heaven? And as a consecration of what should be yet one more happy day, of what value are those hasty morning devotions, — Elizabeth Von Arnim

All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration. — Albert Howard

If souls survive death for all eternity, how can the heavens hold them all? Or for that matter, how can the earth hold all the bodies that have been buried in it? The answers are the same. Just as on earth, with the passage of time, decaying and transmogrified corpses make way for the newly dead, so souls released into the heavens, after a season of flight, begin to break up, burn, and be absorbed back into the womb of reason, leaving room for souls just beginning to fly. This is the answer for those who believe that souls survive death. — Marcus Aurelius

Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song. — G.K. Chesterton

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'. — C.S. Lewis

The Lord created me in the beginning of his ways, for his works; before the world he established me, in the beginning, before he made the earth, before he made the depths, before the mountains were settled, — Eusebius

Nature ... has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this earth with the other great bodies of the universe, in our present state; and it is highly possible that he has likewise cut off all communication betwixt the other planets, and betwixt the different systems. ... We observe, in all of them, enough to raise our curiosity, but not to satisfy it ... It does not appear to be suitable to the wisdom that shines throughout all nature, to suppose that we should see so far, and have our curiosity so much raised ... only to be disappointed at the end ... This, therefore, naturally leads us to consider our present state as only the dawn or beginning of our existence, and as a state of preparation or probation for farther advancement. ... — Colin Maclaurin

How much more so when it comes to the deep truths of the Christian faith. God loves you; you matter to him. That is a fact, stated as a proposition. I imagine most of you have heard it any number of times. Why, then, aren't we the happiest people on earth? It hasn't reached our hearts. Facts stay lodged in the mind, for the most part. They don't speak at the level we need to hear. Proposition speaks to the mind, but when you tell a story, you speak to the heart. We've been telling each other stories since the beginning of time. It is our way of communicating the timeless truths, passing them down. And that's why when Jesus comes to town, he speaks in a way that will get past all our intellectual defenses and disarm our hearts. He tells a certain kind of story. — John Eldredge

For immediately in the beginning, after his original life of blessedness, the first man despised the command of God, and fell into this mortal and perishable state, and exchanged his former divinely inspired luxury for this curse-laden earth. His descendants having filled our earth, showed themselves much worse, with the exception of one here and there, and entered upon a certain brutal and insupportable mode of life. — Eusebius

In the beginning, in the time that was no time, nothing existed but the Womb. And the Womb was a limitless dark cauldron of all things in potential: a chaotic blood-soup of matter and energy, fluid as water yet mud-solid with salts of the earth; red-hot as fire yet restlessly churning and bubbling with all the winds. And the Womb was the Mother, before She took form and gave form to Existence. She was the Deep ... — Barbara G. Walker

We are in the times of the beginning of a new epoch for Christianity. True apostolic Christianity is being restored to the earth. — Rick Joyner

While they were speaking of - in their opinion - great things, around about them only little things - also in their opinion - were happening: everywhere the bushes were turning green, the brooding earth was germinating and beginning to play with her first little Spring creatures, as one might with jewels. — Adalbert Stifter

That dog is mine said those poor children; that place in the sun is mine; such is the beginning and type of usurpation throughout the earth.
[Fr., Ce chien est a moi, disaient ces pauvres enfants; c'est la ma place au soleil. Voila le commencement et l'image de l'usurpation de toute la terre.] — Blaise Pascal

All down the ages we see how blood has stained the surface of the earth; but now a ray of greater light has come, man's intelligence is greater, spirituality is beginning to grow, and a time is surely coming when the religions of the world will be at peace ... let us join together to hasten forward the Divine Cause of unity, until all humanity knows itself to be one family, joined together in love. — Abdu'l- Baha

What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos. — Anselm Kiefer

On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. — W. Somerset Maugham

In the beginning, after this earth was prepared for man, the Lord commenced his work upon what is now called the American continent, where the Garden of Eden was made. In the days of Noah, in the days of the floating of the ark, he took the people to another part of the earth; the earth was divided, and there he set up his kingdom — Brigham Young

I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. — Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes, two people are made for each other. They may come from opposite ends of the earth. Their nations may be sworn to destroy one another. They may be avowed enemies from the very beginning. And it doesn't matter. They belong together. — Caitlin Brennan

All the intrigues of the Gods & Goddesses were the works of Eros, of course. And as the Gods & Goddesses relaxed & lay limp, after the union of love, Love himself wished that he could relax & lay limp too. But he could not, since he was at odds with himself. He tried to figure out what went wrong & concluded that it all went wrong at the beginning, with the Big Bang.
It was those aspects of himself, Eros[Love], Anteros[Mutual Love] & Pothos[Longing], which first united the Sky & the Earth in the primordial egg in the union of love. But it was Himeros who uncoupled them as Passion was fickle & capricious. And Chaos, naturally, followed Passion. — Nicholas Chong

You are radiant."
"Yes, she is."
Daniel.
She turned to him. His blond hair and violet eyes, the strong cut of his shoulders, the full lips that had brought her back to life a thousand times. They had loved each other even longer than Luce had realized. Their love had been strong since the early days of Heaven. Their relationship spanned the entire story of existence. She knew where she'd first met Daniel on Earth-right here, on the singled fields of Troy while the angels were falling-but there was an earlier story. A different beginning to their love.
When? How had it happened?
She searched for the answer in his eyes-but she knew she wouldn't find it there. She had to look back in her own soul. She closed her eyes. — Lauren Kate

No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education. — John Cowper Powys

Christ want to point this out and to warn His followers that in the world everyone should live as though he were alone and should consider His Word and preaching as the very greatest thing on earth, thinking this way to himself: I see my neighbor and the whole city, and yes the whole world, living differently. All those who are great or noble or rich, the princes and the lords, are allied with it. Nevertheless I have an ally who is greater than all of them, namely, Christ and His Word. When I am all alone, therefore, I am still not alone. Because I have the Word of God, I have Christ with me, together with all the dear angels and all the saints since the beginning of the world. Actually there is a bigger crowd and a more glorious procession surrounding me than there could be in the whole world now. Only I cannot see it with my eyes, and I have to watch and bear the offense of having so many people forsake me or live and act in opposition to me. — Martin Luther

I created you in my own image to make for myself a glorious name. You were clean at the beginning, but you defiled yourselves with sins and became sons of the darkness. However, I am gracious and compassionate. I will redeem my people and establish my kingdom. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of my glory, as the waters cover the sea. — Zhang Yun

The planetary perspective provides a kind of out of body experience for us - hovering in orbit and watching ourselves sleepwalk through a slow disaster of our own making. Now, can this experience help us to shake ourselves awake? For virtually all of its history Earth has evolved without us, and we have always seen ourselves as autonomous actors on a passive planetary backdrop. But now we are beginning to see that our futures - those of humanity and of planet Earth - are tightly conjoined. If human civilization is to persist and thrive we will need a completely different view of our planet, and of ourselves, in which we acknowledge both our deep dependence and our increasing influence. — David Grinspoon

No power of earth, or hell, men or devils, can possibly stand against the word of God; and hence it is the very height of folly and wild madness for any one to set up his thoughts or reasonings in opposition to the plain statements of Holy Scripture; and, on the other hand, it is the beginning and end of all true wisdom to submit in all things to the absolute authority of that Word which is settled forever in Heaven. — Charles Henry Mackintosh