Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.
If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.
Whenever the deity contrives misfortunes for a man, he first harms their understanding.
Even from the first it is meek to seek the impossible.
Afterthought makes the first resolve a liar.
You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first.
The first thing to realize in meditation is that there is no authority, that the mind must be completely free to examine, to observe, to learn. And so there is no following, no accepting, no obedience.
The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step, and the first step is the only step.
There is not first understanding and then action. When you understand, that very understanding is action.
The great effect of friendship is beneficence, yet by the first act of uncommon kindness it is endangered.
Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution.
If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
The first step to greatness is to be honest.
When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.
The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.
Admiration must be continued by that novelty which first produces it; and how much soever is given, there must always be reason to imagine that more remains.
A blaze first pleases and then tires the sight.
It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.
All history was at first oral.
A woman of fortune being used the handling of money, spends it judiciously; but a woman who gets the command of money for the first time upon her marriage, has such a gust in spending it, that she throws it away with great profusion.