Top 500 Firsts Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

203. “Act first, explain later.”

— Dan Brown

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. “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

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

— Ernest Hemingway

207. “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

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

— Earl Nightingale

209. “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

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

— W. C. Fields

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

— Paulo Coelho

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

— Jonathan Swift

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Rick Warren

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

— Oswald J. Smith

219. “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

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

— Giordano Bruno

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Winston Churchill

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

— Robin S. Sharma

226. “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

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

— Rumi

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. “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

230. “Self-confidence results, first, from exact knowledge; second, the ability to impart that knowledge.”

— Napoleon Hill

231. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Lou Holtz

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

— Lil Wayne

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

— Saint Augustine

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Winston Churchill

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

— Ronald Reagan

241. “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

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. “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

244. “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

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

— Steve Jobs

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

— C. S. Lewis

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

— Jane Austen

248. “Count the cost first. Don’t pay too big a price for pursuing minor values.”

— Jim Rohn

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

— Khalil Gibran

250. “The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education.”

— Mark Twain