B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.”
“Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European people and Indians, Chippewa Indians. We were welcome to that church, but once we got in, they didn't know what to do with us.”
“Before my head hit the pillow that night, I thought of these concluding words by Desmond Tutu: “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Hope is that last act of faith when we feel the least like being faithful. Hope is the connection shared between the memory of was and the freedom of giving it space to be – even if that means consciously letting go when we truly just want to hold on…hopeful that things will stay the same.
We’ll know that we have reached healing when we look back upon the experience, and we thank the experience through our sincere feelings of gratitude for helping us to become more courageous of heart. That’s usually when we realize that the only limitations of life are moments when we had a small mindset…or in the words of an old Zen saying: “We don’t find the answers. We lose the questions.”
Let the questions flow past the banks where the fever tree grows, as we scoop up waters of hope, and hold onto that until it trickles through our fingers and back into the source of all change, the river of hope. The same place that houses our deeper thinking and commitment toward higher living just like the strength of the fever trees, an embodiment of hope.
Bright green hope…the fever tree way.”
“Before my heart stops beating all I can do is admire the beauty of the seemly endless mortal stars that are decorating the night sky above me, illuminating my path to my next destination.”
Source: Peruvian Nights
“Before my last breath is drawn
and the curtain falls
and the last flower falls on me
I want to live
to love
to be
In this grey world
and time of catastrophe
this hostile existence
with people who need me
and whom I nee
I would learn to value
to discover
to be astonished
I want to learn who I am
who I can be
who I would like to be
so that the days don’t go unused
the hours have goals
and the minutes value
Whenever I laugh or cry
or am silent
on my journey to you
to myself
to God
where the ways
are uneven and thorny
and scarcely known to me
I want to set out
have already embarked
and don’t want to turn back now
without having seen
the blooming of flowers
or heard the rippling of waters
having been amazed
for life is beautiful
Then Friend Death may come
and I can say I have lived
Translated by Katharine Fournier”
Source: Pflücke den Tag.
“Before my marriage, I didn’t think about all the obligations that were awaiting me. My experience has proved useful and I think that I have a natural propensity to feel compassion for people and their problems.”
“Before my mother died, she made me promise to do everything that could be done to make sure my father was not left alone after she was gone.”
“Before my mother died, she told me not to leave Chelsea.”
“Before my mother's death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.”
Source: Obit
“Before my mother's diagnosis with Alzheimer's, I had heard of the disease, but hadn't known anyone who had suffered from it.”
“Before my secret meeting with the Pope I asked him to come wearing white if deep down he agreed with the Reformation. Pretty crazy.”
“Before my sister, Sara, and I went to bed at night, my mom would show us books on Manet and other artists. Even then I was always really interested in how the women looked in the images.”
“Before my teen years, I was losing my hearing pretty quickly, and I was getting very, very angry. I was beginning to become an angry person because of that.”
“Before my tenure, people didn't seem to think that citizens had a right to limit the size of their government.”
“Before my unfeeling eyes, the repressed bitterness of my whole life peels off the suit of natural joy it wears in the prolonged randomness of every day. I realize that I'm always sad, however happy or content I may often feel. And the part of me that realizes this stands a little behind me...”
“Before negotiating a raise, start collecting a file of evidence showing how you've impacted the bottom line. ... Don't believe there's no money in the budget. Don't assume your boss knows how great you've been doing. Don't threaten to leave -- you may be given the opportunity.”
“Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.”
“Before Newton the English word gravity denoted a mood—seriousness, solemnity….”
Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
“Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and revealed to him the art of making le vin. By the aid of this liquid he unveiled more and more truth.”
“Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence, he who saith "thou shalt not" to me is my mortal foe!
Compton”
“Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence, and he who saith "thou shalt" to me is my mortal foe!”
“Before now, I used to be a victim of my environment. I saw people me blame the nation and everything else that is wrong in the country on one person or the other and I simply joined them.”
“Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?”
Source: Selected poems
“Before old age I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well; but to die well is to die willingly.”
“Before one accepts spirituality, astrology is very powerful, like a lion. Then when one enters into a deeper spiritual life, astrology becomes a tiny household cat.”
Source: Astrology: The Supernatural and the Beyond
“before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.”
Source: A View from a Broad
“Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse.”
“Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.”
“Before one can become a magician he must learn to control his own mind; for mind is the substance with which the magician acts, and the power to control it is the beginning of magic.”
Source: Magic White and Black
“Before one can correctly understand the work of the Holy Spirit, he must first of all know the Spirit himself. A frequent source of error and fanaticism about the work of the Holy Spirit is the attempt to study and understand His work without, first of all, coming to know Him as a person.”
Source: THE PERSON AND WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
“Before one can generalize, formalize, and axiomatize, there must be a mathematical substance.”
“Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies.”
Source: Traitor
“Before one can walk as Christ walked,
and talk as He talked,
he must first begin to think as Christ thought.”
“Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate”
Source: Knots
“Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.”
Source: Everybody's Autobiography
“Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.”
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
“Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, & what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, & the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy & wholly impossible.”
Source: When Breath Becomes Air
“Before our albums are released I feel like we still own it, that we have control over our music. But once it's out there in the world it's no longer ours.”
“Before our "company" set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search. I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander cheerfully seconded her proposal. He suggested we search him first. A boy was called to do this, and found a big bunch of keys on him. Our commander acted as though he had been genuinely careless, and gave Plumpie a victorious smile. The rest of us searched each other. This roundabout way of doing things reflected a Maoist practice: things had to look as though they were the wish of the people, rather than commands from above. Hypocrisy and playacting were taken for granted.”
Source: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.”
“Before our eyes we have the results of ideologies such as Marxism, Nazism and fascism, and also of myths like racial superiority, nationalism and ethnic exclusivism. No less pernicious, though not always as obvious, are the effects of materialistic consumerism, in which the exaltation of the individual and the selfish satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life. In this outlook, the negative effects on others are considered completely irrelevant.”
“Before our globe had become egg-shaped or round it was a long trail of cosmic dust or fire-mist, moving and writhing like a serpent. This, say the explanations, was the Spirit of God moving on the chaos until its breath had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its month--emblem of eternity in its spiritual and of our world in its physical sense.”
Source: Secret Teachings of All Ages
“Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?”
“Before our life is rolling down into an inescapable descent, let us snoop around and poke about the happy surprises falling into the basket of our inventiveness and keep on laughing and dancing until the end of time, whatever happens.”
“Before our life story crumbles down from our mind and reaches the dead level of our zest for life, let us dive into the depths of our being and uncover uncharted keystones precious for reawakening. (''Happiness is blowing in the wind'')”
“Before our race, nationality, or religion, we are all human beings. Let's celebrate our differences and not fight over them.”
“Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didin't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.”
“Before parting, we place on record our deep anguish …”
Source: Courts and their Judgements: Premises, Prerequisites, Consequences
“Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country.”