The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.
When I didn’t argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.
He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.
Truth and reason are common to everyone, and are no more his who spake them first than his who speaks them after.
We call comeliness a mischance in the first respect, which belongs principally to the face.
The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.
I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.
He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.
While our pulse beats and we feel emotion, let us put off the business. Things will truly seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down. It is passion that is in command at first, it is passion that speaks, it is not we ourselves.
I do not correct my first imaginings by my second – well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.
A pun is the lowest form of humor – when you don’t think of it first.
First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.
People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.
She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?