Top 500 Firsts Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Count the cost first. Don’t pay too big a price for pursuing minor values.”

— Jim Rohn

252. “A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.”

— William James

253. “Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Mark Twain

255. “Ah, yes. I remember my first beer.”

— Steve Martin

256. “First be a good animal.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

257. “Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again – until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.”

— William Booth

258. “My whole life has been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that let’s you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap.”

— Bette Midler

259. “There must be must be a first mover existing above all – and this we call God.”

— Thomas Aquinas

260. “I must have no fear of failure. It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the Master Work.”

— Paulo Coelho

261. “If you don’t first handle fear and desire, and you get rich, you’ll only be a highpay slave.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

262. “No science ever defends its first principles.”

— Aristotle

263. “I wish the first word I ever said was the word quote, so right before I die I could say unquote.”

— Steven Wright

264. “At first opposites attract. Then opposites attack.”

— Rick Warren

265. “Staying in touch with contacts is as important as getting them in the first place.”

— Harvey MacKay

266. “We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.”

— George Bernard Shaw

267. “Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.”

— Dallas Willard

268. “Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.”

— Victor Hugo

269. “Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you’ll never manage to button up.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

270. “When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.”

— Haruki Murakami

271. “The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.”

— Jodi Picoult

272. “If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.”

— Anton Chekhov

273. “No one whose first concern is feeling good can be a disciple. We are called to carry a cross and to glorify God.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

274. “All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

275. “There is little sense in attempting to change external conditions, you must first change inner beliefs, then outer conditions will change accordingly.”

— Bryan Adams

276. “The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.”

— Tom Robbins

277. “An educated person must learn to act justly, beginning, first of all, with his thoughts, then later in his deeds. That is what it means to be educated.”

— Pramoedya Ananta Toer

278. “I was the first one in the gym, and the last one to leave.”

— Muhammad Ali

279. “There is no greater invitation to love than loving first.”

— Saint Augustine

280. “Whatever you want others to be, first be that yourself. Then, you will find others responding in like manner to you.”

— Paramahansa Yogananda

281. “Oh darling, don’t be bitter. It’s the first instinct of the weak.”

— Sarah Dessen

282. “The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.”

— Saint Augustine

283. “Sometimes, when everyone else is waiting for someone else to take the first step, you need to be the one to drive the change.”

— Robin S. Sharma

284. “Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.”

— Douglas Adams

285. “Man is guided by the stomach. He walks and the stomach goes first and the head afterwards. Have you not seen that? It will take ages for the head to go first.”

— Swami Vivekananda

286. “First open your heart, then open your Bible.”

— Rick Warren

287. “My first popular book, ‘A Brief History of Time,’ aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.”

— Stephen Hawking

288. “Every individual has the power to change his or her material or financial status by first changing the nature of his or her beliefs.”

— Napoleon Hill

289. “Would you like an adventure now, or would like to have your tea first?”

— James M. Barrie

290. “All new learning looks at first like chaos.”

— Adrienne Rich

291. “I can affect change by transforming the only thing that I ever had control over in the first place and that is myself.”

— Deepak Chopra

292. “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”

— D. H. Lawrence

293. “The Vedanta teaches men to have faith in themselves first.”

— Swami Vivekananda

294. “Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.”

— Aldous Huxley

295. “Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.”

— N. T. Wright

296. “The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.”

— Steve Jobs

297. “See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.”

— Douglas Adams

298. “Before you can control conditions, you must first control yourself.”

— Napoleon Hill

299. “The soul, which is the first principle of life, is not a body, but the act of a body; just as heat, which is the principle of calefaction, is not a body, but an act of a body.”

— Thomas Aquinas

300. “It must be God first, God second, and God third.”

— Oswald Chambers