Top 500 Firsts Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Every step is a first step if it’s a step in the right direction.”

— Terry Pratchett

202. “A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.”

— Amy Tan

203. “First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product – the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.”

— Steve Jobs

204. “The talkative listen to no one, for they are ever speaking. And the first evil that attends those who know not to be silent is that they hear nothing.”

— Plutarch

205. “He who would be free must strike the first blow.”

— Frederick Douglass

206. “Act first, explain later.”

— Dan Brown

207. “The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.”

— Orhan Pamuk

208. “I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.”

— Ernest Hemingway

209. “Should you ask me what is the first thing in religion, I should reply that the first, second, and third thing therein is humility.”

— Saint Augustine

210. “We’ve got to be of service first before we can expect money.”

— Earl Nightingale

211. “Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.”

— Nick Hornby

212. “First prize was a week in Philadelphia. Second prize was two weeks.”

— W. C. Fields

213. “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

— Jonathan Swift

214. “Don’t live every day as if it were your last. Live every day as if it were your first.”

— Paulo Coelho

215. “You can’t change the past so don’t let it haunt you. You can change the future but first you’ve got to want to.”

— Pat Benatar

216. “A slave stands infront of Allah on two occasions. The first during salah, and secondly on the Day of Judgment. Whoseover stands correctly in the first, the second standing will be made easier for him. And whosoever, disregards the first standing, the second standing will be extremely difficult.”

— Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

217. “I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.”

— Steve Jobs

218. “First I went left, he did too. Then I went right, and he did too. Then I went left again, and he went to buy a hot dog.”

— Zlatan Ibrahimovic

219. “To accomplish anything you must first have a mission, a goal, a hope, a vision.”

— Rick Warren

220. “We don’t have the freedom of speech to talk about the weather. We have the first amendment so we can say some very controversial things.”

— Ron Paul

221. “We talk of the second coming, half the world has never heard of the first.”

— Oswald J. Smith

222. “If the first button of one’s coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.”

— Giordano Bruno

223. “This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse anything outside, not to lay the blame upon anyone outside, but stand up, lay the blame on yourself. You will find that is always true. Get hold of yourself.”

— Swami Vivekananda

224. “Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

225. “The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not trade; character, not technicalities.”

— Winston Churchill

226. “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.”

— Mary Oliver

227. “First of all, begin to live out of the glory of your imagination, not your memory.”

— Robin S. Sharma

228. “I surrendered unto Him all there was of me; everything! Then for the first time I realized what it meant to have real power.”

— Kathryn Kuhlman

229. “A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”

— Milton Friedman

230. “I must first have the sense of God’s possession of me before I can have the sense of His presence with me.”

— Watchman Nee

231. “Whenever they rebuild an old building, they must first of all destroy the old one.”

— Rumi

232. “I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

233. “The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.”

— Joseph Campbell

234. “Take the first chance that you get, because you may never get another one.”

— Lil Wayne

235. “Let your first hour set the theme of success and positive action that is certain to echo through your entire day. Today will never happen again.”

— Og Mandino

236. “A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.”

— Oscar Wilde

237. “There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place – then it won’t make a damn.”

— Ken Kesey

238. “First we become the best, then we’ll become first.”

— Lou Holtz

239. “Humility is first, second and third in Christianity.”

— Saint Augustine

240. “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is a policy of first importance to a public man.”

— Winston Churchill

241. “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.”

— Ronald Reagan

242. “For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.”

— Albert Camus

243. “Life is like a parachute jump, you’ve got to get it right the first time.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

244. “Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after.”

— Marcus Aurelius

245. “Comfort comes into your house first as guest, then as a host, then finally as the master.”

— Khalil Gibran

246. “Any business plan won’t survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.”

— Jeff Bezos

247. “You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.”

— C. S. Lewis

248. “Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”

— Jane Austen

249. “If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

250. “When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.”

— Steve Jobs