Beginning

“ Enter Quince for the Prologue.
Prologue.
If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end. ”

“ A beginning can be made in different ways: in a purely practical way by the acquisition of good habits; or philosophically, by meditating upon, and coming to know, and discriminating between, the true and the untrue in the conduct of life; or, through religion, at once seeking the infinite and the power that thence springs. ”

“ That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation. ”

“ Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond what our imaginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some people may suppose these views to be, I think I could show them to be fairly suggested by the true theory of human nature and to arise from the natural course of human affairs. ”

“ And it is often chance that places in our hands those books which mark the beginning of a new era in the evolution of our ideas. The most casual circumstances, a few lines that happen somehow to come before our eyes, decide our future and plant us in the appointed groove. ”

“ "Everything is all one—that is the beginning and end with you. ”

“ She did not know then that imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will. ”

“ An idea comes to me, or I to it', she says, airily, 'a scene—a situation—a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint I begin to build', but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? ”

“ I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at an indefinite future period. ”

“ A. Hence, each reality, each true and actually occurring event in life is that wherein you forget yourself. This is the beginning and real focus of life, whatever further subordinated determinations this focus may involve, because it happens to be such a particular focus. ”

“ It must have unity of thought, emotion, and expression, all growing out of a definite vision of emotion, having a beginning, middle, and end, which mark the progress of the idea or feeling seeking formulation. ”

“ That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second. ”

“ “Then you are quite behind the age,” said the Water-rat. “Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle. ”

“ Nevertheless, as in every phenomenon the Beginning remains always the most notable moment; ”

“ How shall we conceive aright the FIRST PRINCIPLE and ORIGIN of all things, itself unoriginated and unbeginning, the source of all beginnings? Or again, what is that FIRST PRINCIPLE which, being assumed, shall be found a sufficient explanation of the motion and change, the order and adaptation, the life and feeling, the consciousness and reason, we call, collectively, the universe? ”

“ You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; ”

“ It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe,
For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings––there are no such things.
There are only middles.” ”

“ All beginnings are very troublesome things, and such she found them. ”

“ But if the history of any human soul could be perfectly known, who would wish to describe this passage from the dawn of the ideal to the morning of the real—this transition from life as it is imagined through hopes and dreams to life as it is known through action and submission? ”

“ With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! ”

“ Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively antithetic and dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a close-knit variety in unity,—that interaction between, and anticipation of the whole in, the parts, and that indication of the later stages in the earlier,—which is so strikingly operative in the order and organization of the various constituents and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind and character, and which appears again in the Reality apprehended, reproduced, and enriched by man’s powers. ”

“ For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. ”

“ I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy,
'The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. ”

“ In contrast to this view, there is the allocentric outlook which is marked by an 'open encounter of the total person with the world.' Growth, spontaneity and expression are the goals of such an existence. ”

“ Their height and depth, past, present and to come.
So, those who follow the great Work-master's law
From small things up to great, may one day learn
The structure of the heavens, discern the whole
Within the part, as men through Love see God.
Oh, holy night, deep night of stars, whose peace
Descends upon the troubled mind like dew,
Healing it with the sense of that pure reign
Of constant law, enduring through all change ”

“ I stop to say that, during the months past, as before, her life had gone sweetly, pleasantly, without ruffle or labor or care or sickness, or division, even, into hours and days and nights,—a flowing onward, like time,—an existence so serenely perfect as not to be a subject of consciousness. ”

“ The progress of the whole world is described by Scripture, as in a beautiful poem, wherein one may follow the descent of time, and contemplate the variety, manifoldness, equity, order, righteousness, and beauty of the multitude of divine judgments proceeding from the wisdom of God ruling the world: and as with a poem, so with this ordering of the world, one cannot see its beauty save by considering the whole.... ”

“ When shall the morning dawn that shall usher in a new day, a day of universal temperance and purity on earth? When shall the darkness break, and a new era of light, of knowledge and wisdom, come flooding in upon us? Not until man shall study the laws of his own being, and, so studying, learn to live in harmony with those laws. ”

“ As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second Miracle Age. ”

“ This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes ”

“ Down below them, is another question which is included in them all and which sooner or later must be faced by each and every one of us: "Why am I here on earth? Has my life any purpose in the great, everlasting scheme of things? What is that purpose?" ”

“ After the long-continued play of mere appetite and sensual life, there came the operation of thought, reflection, invention, art, science, moral sentiments, religious belief and hope; and thus, life and being, in a far higher sense than had ever existed, even in the highest degree, in the long ages of the earth's previous existence. ”

“ When they who go before
Go furnished—or because their span was brief,
When in the acquist of what is life’s true gage,
Truth, knowledge, and that other worthiest lore,
They had fulfilled already a long age. ”

“ To these four sections, the four operations of the soul correspond,—conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. ”

“ All these life-histories of countries and individuals stand spread out to God's eternal gaze. At each stage He sees the possibilities foreclosed or initiated; He influences development by the primal distribution in the past and by direction and inspiration in the present. ”

“ In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and for the new ideals. ”

“ We have learned that the narrative is an allegory of the regeneration of the human mind. The heaven and the earth were found to be symbols of the two minds of man, or if you prefer the expression, the two regions of his mind, its heavenly and its earthly, or in other words, its spiritual and its natural. Creation symbolizes the regeneration, that is the rebirth, or new creation of the spiritual nature. ”

“ We know now that they are stages in a growth, and in a growth not determined by an accidental environment only, but by an original purpose, a purpose to be realized in the history of the human race as a whole. ”

“ Your future is the not yet temporally expressed region wherein you, as finite being, seek your own further expression. That future is still, in one aspect, as we shall see, causally undetermined, precisely in so far as therein something unique, that is yours and yours only, is to appear in the form of various individually designed expressions of your life-purpose, — various individual deeds. ”

“ Great progress has taken place in this third phase of my life, but it's as though the central figure of the jigsaw puzzle of your life is complete and clear and unchanging, and around the edges other pieces keep fitting in. There is always a growing edge, but the progress is harmonious. ”

“ What is of interest here is not such a motive as possible expression for a view of the world belonging to a more primitive stage in the phase of development, but it is this episode as one of the poetical motives of a novel. ”

“ We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be ”

“ Every act is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the life, the destiny,—a most significant, a most tremendous truth: thought on the one hand, life, destiny, on the other. ”