"The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke."
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Firsts quotes
Firsts
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Firsts quotes (page 74 of 439)
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"Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards."
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"I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings."
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"The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface."
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"Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed."
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"If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed."
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"...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum"."
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"Before you can do something, you must first be something."
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"[Donald Trump's inauguration] will be the first one that I miss since I've been in Congress. You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right."
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"but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt."
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"Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place."
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"God's first line of defense - and offense - for every situation is prayer."
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"In life, the first act is always exciting but it is the second act - that's where the depth comes in."
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"Form displays the relation [to beings] itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open."
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"What are the things we should pray for? First, our personal troubles...The greatest trouble we can ever know is thinking that we have no trouble for we can become hard-hearted and insensible to what is inside of us."
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"I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!"
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"My sense is that being a First Lady is a full-time job, but I'll know more when the time comes."
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"It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him - that is, not liked but . . . how to put it . . . was interested, or whatever."
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"I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others."
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"I never asked to be born in the first place."
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