A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“At the beginning of 1955 only about 60 percent of American homes had TVs.”
“At the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.”
“At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And these possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. [...] In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living. (p.195)”
Source: The Midnight Library
“At the beginning of a long-running play, everyone's nervous and paces around in a panic and reapplies lipstick. After a while, you'll get long-running card games or word games like Boggle.”
“At the beginning of a love affair, not even the neurotic is neurotic.”
Source: Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin
“At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.”
“At the beginning of a meditation session your thoughts will be relatively earthbound. You will think about yourself, your world, problems, difficulties and anxieties.”
“At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down.”
“At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.”
Source: The Plague
“At the beginning of a remodel, money is everything, but as you go along, it becomes secondary to the vision. You can't have the house looking like a glorious jewel and leave the cracked linoleum or the icky light fixture, so you spend and spend and spend. Then one day it suddenly occurs to you that all that play money you've been throwing around is real - and it's in someone else's bank account.”
Source: This Damn House!: My Subcontract with America
“At the beginning of all experimental work stands the choice of the appropriate technique of investigation”
“At the beginning of all growth, everything imitates. All of us, when we were children, also only imitated. But children grow up and begin their own development.”
Source: Bumi Manusia
“At the beginning of all growth, everything imitates.”
Source: This Earth of Mankind
“At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life's wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it's a necessary folly, born of lovers' belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing, true love.”
Source: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
“At the beginning of almost every industry, the available products and services are so expensive to own and complicated to use that only people with a lot of money and a lot of skill have access to them. A disruptive technology is an innovation that simplifies the product and makes it so affordable that a whole new population of people can now have one and use it at the beginning for simple applications, and then it improves to the point that it makes the old technology obsolete.”
“At the beginning of anything out of the ordinary, the mass of the people always dislike it.”
Source: Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-49: V. 1: Pre-Marxist Period, 1912-20: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-49
“At the beginning of each chapter, a heading tells us about what is happening in the chapter. We can ask, "What was going on here? What was this person feeling?" When we take time to look more closely at the scriptures, we can better understand what they can teach us. This will build our self-confidence and our testimony.”
“At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.'”
“At the beginning of every role I take, I have to start from basics and build it up. It's like a new construction.”
“At the beginning of every winter people are careful to install storm windows. These extra panes of glass protect their houses against the bitter winds. We do something very similar to protect our minds through the practice of meditation.”
Source: Your life is your message: finding harmony with yourself, others, & the earth
“At the beginning of his administration, Obama homed right in on Medicare, which he wanted to fix by reducing the overall cost of health care in this country. He risked everything - some would claim he lost everything - by being so single-minded.”
“At the beginning of his administration, Reagan tried set the basis for American military intervention in El Salvador - which is about what Kennedy did when he came into office in regard to Vietnam. Well, when Kennedy tried it in Vietnam, it just worked like a dream. Virtually nobody opposed American bombing of South Vietnam in 1962. It was not an issue. But when Reagan began to talk of involving American forces in El Salvador there was a huge popular uproar. And he had to choose a much more indirect way of supporting the collection of gangsters in power there. He had to back off.”
“At the beginning of his struggle, the Warrior says: "I have dreams."”
“At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?”
“At the beginning of meditation training thoughts will arrive one on top of another, uninterrupted, like a steep mountain waterfall. Gradually, as you perfect meditation, thoughts become like the water in a deep, narrow gorge, then a great river slowly winding its way down to the sea; finally the mind becomes like a still and placid ocean, ruffled by only the occasional ripple or wave.”
“At the beginning of my acting career, I worked for two seasons at the RSC and spent a lot of time in the Cotswolds exploring Shakespeare's countryside. It's my kind of English landscape, with its tiny villages and one-room thatched pubs.”
“At the beginning of my career I was going through a really weird phase of dressing in boys clothes. I would only wear one American Apparel T-shirt and shorts and brogues the whole year round. Not the same T-shirt, obviously, but one style of American Apparel T-shirt. I think I was going through a tomboy stage.”
“At the beginning of my career, a more senior photographer told me to shoot stories on women and I didn't want to. But I spent two and a half years in India and chose to do stories about women because I was shocked by their treatment. My stories in the Middle East and on the border of Europe and Asia were a response to my time in India. They weren't driven by a feminist idea but when you're moved by women's issues in these countries you can't help becoming a feminist somehow.”
“At the beginning of my career, fresh out of college, I did everything that I could do. And now I'm a little bit more selective. I think that's sort of a natural process.”
“At the beginning of my career, I saw an opportunity to forge new ground and focus on songwriting. Not many people were doing that at the time. Pretty much nobody. I thought I could write some really cool songs that would rise above all these dozens of genres that exist within dance music. I'd make it more about the songs. For the last 20 years, I've been sharing stories of my life through music. I've been writing songs about my life.”
“At the beginning of my career, I shot a lot more documentaries because I liked the adventure, and probably also because it was easier, and still is easier, for women DPs to shoot documentary than it is to shoot fiction.”
“At the beginning of my imprisonment, however, what I found most difficult was that I had the thoughts of a free man. For example, I was obsessed by a desire to be on a beach and to walk down to the sea. When I imagined the sound of those first little waves beneath my feet, the sensation of water flowing over my body and the feeling of freedom this brought me, it struck me how much the walls of my prison had closed in on me. But that just lasted a few months. Afterwards, I had only the thoughts of a prisoner. I looked forward to the daily walk I took around the courtyard or the visit from my lawyer. As for the rest of the time, I got used to it.”
Source: The Stranger
“At the beginning of my TV and movie stuff, I would be really critical of myself, but I've gotten better and better. There's always little things that I think, "Oh, that could have been whatever," but most of the time I'm able to let go and watch like an audience member.”
“At the beginning of one session when I asked carelessly, 'How are you?' Archie gently reminded me of my insensitivity. 'That's a difficult question, to which I only have a complicated answer.' I should have known better. The number of times friends and clients have told me people ask, 'How are you?' and they want to scream, 'How the hell do you think I am, given...?
I asked Archie if there was a better question, remembering the Sheryl Sandberg suggestion: 'How are you today?'
He said, 'I don't think people really want to hear the answer. They want to hear you're fine so they don't have to put a lot of effort in. I've noticed people tend to stay away now. My social network has shrunk. It isn't deliberate. They feel helpless... If they ask I tend to talk around the edges.'
I was moved by the truth of his words, and how isolating suffering can be. I told him I really wanted to know.”
Source: Every Family Has A Story: How we inherit love and loss
“At the beginning of our life, we may feel bare and helpless and gradually adorn ourselves with the most fanciful trappings, trying to be ‘someone else’. After erring and drifting, we eventually realize we want to discover ‘ourselves’, without any airbrushing, so as to meet our real self and not the one imposed on us. ("Lost the global story.")”
“At the beginning of our relationship, my heart pounded so loudly whenever I
stood near him. He had an effect on me that no aspiring vicar should have on a young woman.”
Source: Stepping Stones
“At the beginning of the 19th century, all that the world knew of the history of the ancient Middle East was what preserved in Greek and Hebrew, that is to say by the only two peoples active in the ancient Middle East who had preserved continuity of identity into modern times, and who had retained and could still read their ancient writings. This history was part of their collective memory and was passed by them, with their scriptures and classics, to Christendom—but not to Islam, for Muslims read neither the Bible nor the classics. The name of Cyrus was well known in medieval Europe and appears even in the sagas of faraway Iceland. It does not appear in Islam, not even in Persia, where the pre-Islamic past was rejected and literally buried. The recovery was for long the work of European, later also of Russian and American, scholars, and was only gradually accepted by the Muslims of the Middle East.”
Source: History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented
“At the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers - some had risen to levels of professional jobs - but they were, in some ways, protected because they were so small.”
“At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.”
“At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.”
“At the beginning of the 60's our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone.' But this isn't reality.”
“At the beginning of the book [The Dissemblers], Ivy [Wilkes] has a long way to go in order to achieve self-sufficiency. Although she is very independent, even somewhat of a loner, she is very affected by other peoples' opinions. At the opening of the book, her ideas of success and achievement are largely defined by the approval of others; over the arc of the story, I think that begins to change a little.”
“At the beginning of the cask and the end take thy fill but be saving in the middle; for at the bottom the savings comes too late.”
“At the beginning of the day, it is all about the choices I make. It is about what I am willing to sacrifice—one thing I do know, I am not willing, and I do not want to sacrifice my life for anyone.”
~Love is respect ♥~”
Source: In Love With Blindfolds On
“At the beginning of the day, when you're doing a show like this, you want to entertain and you want people to have a really fun time...but at the end of the day you want them to walk out feeling changed and taking something more away from it...and it's really kind of rare that you get to do that all in the same night.”
“At the beginning of the Larry Sanders show, you know, we were grateful to get guests. At the end, it was as if we actually were The Tonight Show. People would come on, and it had the same sort of imprimatur as if we were on the air. I've been on a lot of talk shows during that time and since then, and people would come up in the dressing room or in the corridors and say, "You guys got it exactly right." Or they would say, "We have Larry Sanders moments every day."”
“At the beginning of the month I wrote a letter to Santa—I know, childish—but I needed something to hope for, even if it felt silly.”
He smiled and shifted to sit by my side, winding his arm around my wait. “Wishing and hoping is never silly, Harper,” he whispered, nipping my jaw.
I leaned into his hold and twined our fingers. “I had two things on it: you, and to be accepted.” I stared at the black ink marking my letter in my messy handwriting.
He pressed his forehead against my temple. “You were on mine too, only, I didn’t send it to Santa.”
Source: Christmas Wishes
“At the beginning of the new century, it is the common aspiration of the peoples of the two countries to deepen mutual understanding, enhance trust, develop friendship and strengthen cooperation.”
“At the beginning of the new millennium, we still do not know why mathematics is true and whether it is certain. But we know what we do not know in an immeasurably richer way than we did. And learning this has been a remarkable achievement-among the greatest and least-known of the modern era.”
Source: The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World