Great Throughts Treasury

"Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education." - John Ruskin

"The only thing which is not purely mechanical about falling in love is its beginning. Although all those who fall in love do so in the same way, not all fall in love for the same reason. There is no single quality which is universally loved." - José Ortega y Gasset

"Man's nature... is not corrupt. The idea of God is innate in man's mind from the beginning; so that by reason alone man has arrived, everywhere, at a recognition of God which is sufficient. Religious intolerance is blasphemy, since in their primal ground and ultimate sense, all religions are one, as is mankind." - Joseph Campbell

"I have been here since the beginning, and I shall be until the end of days; for there is no ending to my existence. The human souls is but a part of a burning torch which god separated from Himself at Creation." - Kahlil Gibran

"Marriage is the union of two divinities that a third might be born on earth. It is the union of two souls in a strong love for the abolishment of separateness. It is that higher unity which fuses the separate unites within the two spirits. It is the golden ring in a chain whose beginning is a glance, and whose ending is Eternity." - Kahlil Gibran

"The Reality of Life is Life itself, whose beginning is not in the womb, and whose ending is not in the grave. For the years that pass are naught but a moment in eternal life; and the world of matter and all in it is but a dream compared to the awakening which we call the terror of Death." - Kahlil Gibran

"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge." - Kahlil Gibran

"The form of the formless. The image of the imageless. It is called indefinable and beyond imagination. Stand before it and there is no beginning. Follow it and there is no end. Stay with the ancient Tao, move with the present. Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao." -

"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt...we must leave them with a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it." -

"Reflection is the beginning of reform." -

"Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." -

"No person is without sense of compassion, or a sense of shame, or a sense of courtesy, or a sense of right and wrong. The sense of compassion is the beginning of humanity; the sense of shame is the beginning of righteousness; the sense of courtesy is the beginning of decorum [li]; the sense of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom. Every person has within him these four beginnings; just as he has four limbs." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL

"Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler

"Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL

"All achievement, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea." - Napoleon Hill

"The desire to lead a more purposeful life, to search for ultimate meanings, is a central theme of human experience... This spiritual urge is undeniable. From the beginning of human history, we have been embarked on a search for transcendent meaning." - Norman Lear, fully Norman Milton Lear

"To love one's self is the beginning of a life-long romance." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

"I believe that at the beginning God made a world for each separate man, and in that world which is within us one should seek to live." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

"People had been trying to understand the universe through love ever since the beginning of time." - Paulo Coelho

"Life’s but a means unto an end, that end, beginning, mean, and end to all things - God." - Philip James Bailey

"The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken." - Plato NULL

"The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato NULL

"This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated off; and, in my view, will be rightly called education." - Plato NULL

"Wonder is the only beginning of philosophy." - Plato NULL

"Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in heaven and on earth; and he who would be blessed and happy should be fro the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he an be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." - Plato NULL

"Truth is the beginning of every good thing both in Heaven and on earth; and he who would be blessed and happy should be from the first a partaker of the truth, for then he can be trusted." - Plato NULL

"When the ancients said a work well begun was half done, they meant to impress the importance of always endeavoring to make a good beginning." - Polybius NULL

"There is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"At the beginning of the spiritual journey, many of us pushed away our humanity in an attempt to embrace our divinity... we've been learning to accept rather than reject our human qualities, creating a new partnership between the mundane and transcendent parts of ourselves." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert

"Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

"Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity." - Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum

"Greatness comes from beginning something that does not end with you." - Robin Sharma

"What could begin this evil but pride, that is the beginning of all sin? And what is pride but a perverse desire of height, in forsaking Him to whom the soul ought solely to cleave, as the beginning thereof, to make the self seem the beginning." -

"In religion, as in human learning, we need a gradual introduction, beginning by the more easily learned matters and the first elements. The Creator comes to our aid so that our eyes, accustomed to darkness, may be gradually opened to the full light of truth." - Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL

"Too soon did the doctors of the church forget that the heart - the moral nature - was the beginning and the end and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion." -

"The ultimate standpoint of Zen, therefore, is that we have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our being, that there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between the finite and the infinite, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly after has been there all the time." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"Wisdom begins in wonder. [Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.]" - Socrates NULL

"In my beginning is my end... In my end is my beginning." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown remembered gate where the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree. Not known, because not looked for. But heart, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall beware and all manner of things shall beware when the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crown not of fire, and the fire and the rose are one." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"The young feel tired at the end of an action. The old at the beginning." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge." - Thomas Carlyle

"Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light." - Thomas Carlyle

"Loss of love and intimacy can be a profound form of initiation. Paradoxically, initiation means beginning, and yet the most powerful initiations always involve some sort of death." - Thomas Moore

"The ending of a relationship is as mysterious as its beginning... We tend to look for rational causes and to blame one of the parties for committing the crime of ending. Fate and its important relationship to the soul are forgotten... The soul in a relationship is not only contained in each individual, it is also contained in the relationship itself." - Thomas Moore

"Apparently, it is the nature of all human relationships to aspire to be permanent. To propose temporariness as a goal in such relationships is to bring them under the rule of aims and standards that prevent them form beginning. Neither marriage, nor kinship, nor friendship, nor neighborhood can exist with a life expectancy that is merely convenient." - Wendell Berry