If you start a race sloppily or head off in the wrong direction, you
have no chance of winning. Likewise, how you being the creative task has a
lot to do with how and where it ends up.
See also
beginners, experts, goals*, preparation*, problems*, questions*, rationality,
science, understanding, vision
Quotes
‘Well begun is half done.’
— Aristotle
‘Few ideas are in themselves practical. It is for want of imagination in
applying them that they fail. The creative process does not end with an idea–it
only starts with an idea.’
— John Arnold
‘Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you
are doing the impossible.’
— St. Francis of Assisi
‘If a Man will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts; but if he will
be content to begin with doubts he will end in certainties.’
— Francis Bacon
‘All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we
leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter
into another.’
— Anatole France
‘All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great
works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.’
— Albert Camus
‘ “Begin at the beginning”, the King said, gravely, “and go till you come to
the end; then stop. ”'
— Lewis Carroll
‘Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.’
— Demosthenes
‘A great thought begins by seeing something differently, with a shift of the
mind’s eye.’
— Albert Einstein
‘The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come
out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with
appropriate friction.’
— Michael Eisner
‘Home is where one starts from.’
— T. S. Eliot
‘Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.’
— Henry Ford
‘Every man starts with all there is. Everything is here–the essence and
substance of all there is.’
— Henry Ford
‘Daring ideas are like chessmen moved foreword; they may be beaten but they
may start a winning game.’
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power
and magic in it.’
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.’
— Ernest Hemingway
‘He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.’
— Horace
‘Genius begins great works; labour alone finishes them.’
— Joseph Joubert
‘True creativity often starts where language ends.’
— Arthur Koestler
‘There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be
the beginning.’
— Louis L’Amour
‘In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin;
A grass blade’s no easier to make than an oak.’
— James Russell Lowell
‘What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person
must start at the beginning.’
— Rollo May
‘There are always twenty excellent reasons for doing nothing for every one
reason for starting anything–especially if it has never been done before.’
— Prince Philip
‘The beginning is the most important part of the work.’
— Plato
‘What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.’
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
‘If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest.’
— Publilius Syrus
‘My advice to any young person at the beginning of their career is to try to
look for the mere outlines of big things with their fresh, untrained and
unprejudiced mind.’
— Hans Selye
‘Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you
will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.’
— George Bernard Shaw
‘All great truths begin as blasphemies.’
— George Bernard Shaw
‘Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.’
— Tom Stoppard
‘Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration
is not discernable at the beginning.’
— Igor Stravinsky
‘Every beginning is a consequence. Every beginning ends something.’
— Paul Valéry
‘All glory comes from daring to begin.’
— Eugene F. Ware
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