If you want to be free, first of all free yourself from your stomach.
—Leo Tolstoy
The first and the best victory is to conquer self.
—Plato
A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.
—Charles Dickens
Man’s first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
—Blaise Pascal
The first draft of anything is shit.
—Ernest Hemingway
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
—Henry David Thoreau
He who would know the world must first manufacture it.
—Immanuel Kant
In order to write about life first you must live it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
There are better pleasures than to be first.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
There must be must be a first mover existing above all – and this we call God.
—Thomas Aquinas
Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.
—Thomas Jefferson
There are four powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses sight, hearing, and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.
—Thomas Edison
No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity
—Seneca
Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.
—Aristotle
Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ’til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
—Isaac Newton
What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me.
—J. Gresham Machen
Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
—Plato
The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.
—Plato
Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.
—Plato
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
—Immanuel Kant
Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.
—Nikolai Gogol
We must accept his (Jesus) person first, and then his benefits: as it is in the marriage covenant.
—John Flavel
Opening our windows toward Jerusalem,
And looking thitherward, we see
First Bethlehem
Then Nazareth and Galilee,
And afterwards, Gethsemane;
And then the little hill called Calvary.
—Amy Carmichael