First Step Quotes

“Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace.”

— Jacques Derrida

“When you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, how can you expect anyone to see you unlike you see yourself. Make you someone you like, and you will learn to love yourself. That is the first step in the quest for Love and acceptance.”

— Daniel R. Gadberry

“You gotta beware of the utopian train of thought, mate. That's usually the first step towards fascism.”

— Daniel Clausen

“His (Claude Legrand's) method is founded in a simple directive: Don't conclude that the problem as it's first presented, or as you first perceive it, is indeed the actual problem. If you do, and you've got it wrong, the solution you produce may also be wrong. The first step to figuring out what your problem is, Legrand says, is to deconstruct it by questioning it.”

— Amanda Lang

“Often admitting our weakness and fear is the first step to finding rest in God. Our trust in Him isn't conveyed though superhuman confidence as much as it comes in the way of childlike reliance on Him.”

— Tracie Peterson

“One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“The first step toward understanding is of course argument.”

— Leonard Wibberley

“The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?”

— Arundhati Roy

“The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

— Milan Kundera

“Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”

— Rhonda Byrne

“Getting rid of the dictator is only a first step in establishing a free society. The dictatorship must also be disassembled.”

— George Ayittey

“The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”

— Saul Alinsky

“It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually building the station. Right? Otherwise trains won't stop there. And you can't meet the person who means so much to you. If you find some defect, you can adjust it later, as needed. First things first. Build the station. A special station just for her. The kind of station where trains want to stop, even if they have no reason to do so. Imagine that kind of station, and give it actual color and shape. Write your name on the foundation with a nail, and breathe life into it.”

— Haruki Murakami

“My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it.”

— Alice Walker

“It's time to start really writing some stuff, and I really wanted to write some stuff in the vein of the original Misfits, and this was really the first step in that direction.”

— Jerry Only

“The first step is you have to say that you can.”

— Will Smith

“When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child's internalizing shame because the children carry their parent's shame. ABANDONMENT: THE LEGACY OF BROKEN MUTUALITY Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one's authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one's primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally (all shame-based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their children's emotions.”

— John Bradshaw

“Recognizing our shortcomings is a crucial first step on the path to making better decisions, creating better societies, and fixing our institutions.”

— Dan Ariely

“The first step is clearly defining what it is you're after, because without knowing that, you'll never get it.”

— Halle Berry

“The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step, and the first step is the only step.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.”

— George Orwell

“Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called awareness training, and like AA's insistence on forcing alcoholics to recognize their cues, it's the first step in habit reversal training. The tension that Mandy felt in her nails cued her nail biting habit.”

— Charles Duhigg

“I did not know that the first step in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim. I also did not know that the second step is to isolate the victim. The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. We victims know something you [non-victims] usually don't. It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser, because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is to 'kill her'. Over 70% of domestic violence murders happens after the victim has ended the relationship.”

— Leslie Morgan Steiner

“Change your undergarments every day. This very basic activity is the first step in becoming a fashionable young woman.”

— Novala Takemoto

“Openness is the first step toward recovery ... addiction remains a secret because of the overwhelming shame associated with it.”

— David Sheff

“Resentment is always resentment against oneself. The
rebel, on the contrary, from his very first step, refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting
for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose.”

— Albert Camus

“The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”

— Elon Musk

“I have a strong hips and groin. It's the leg speed, the way I approach the ball. My first step is not very hard, but my second is explosive.”

— Sebastian Janikowski

“What is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?”

— Michael Gerber

“A guest worker program should help farmers who are willing to pay a fair wage for law-abiding, dependable workers - not punish them ... And for this reason I support replacing the H-2A program and implementing new policies that will bring our illegal agricultural workers out of the shadows, as a first step in the process of overhauling our nation's immigration system.”

— Bob Goodlatte

“Imagination is the first step in creation whether in words or trifles. The mental pattern must always precede the material form.”

— William Walker Atkinson

“When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively ... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.”

— Wolfgang Pauli

“Knowing where you are going is the first step to getting there.”

— Ken Blanchard

“Knowing how to win is the first step. We must also know how to make use of our victories.”

— Polybius

“The man who pauses on the paths of treason, Halts on a quicksand, the first step engulfs him.”

— Aaron Hill

“The first step in achieving prosperity and wealth is learning to appreciate what you already have.”

— Samuel Richardson

“It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.”

— Anne Sexton

“The basic problem is not political, it is a-political and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves.”

— Thomas Merton

“The difference between successes and failures in life is simply that winners take the first step.”

— Brian Tracy

“The first rule for prayer, the most important first step, is not about how to do it, but to just do it; not to perfect and complete it but to begin it. Once the car is moving, it's easy to steer it in the right direction, but it's much harder to start it up when it's stalled. And prayer is stalled in our world.”

— Peter Kreeft

“How to begin the journey? You need only to take the first step. When? There is always now.”

— George Leonard

“I am dedicating the majority of my wealth to improving education. It is the key to the survival of the human race. We have to plan for our collective future
and the first step begins with the social, emotional, and intellectual tools we provide to our children. As humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to think and to adapt - as educators, storytellers, and communicators our responsibility is to continue to do so.”

— George Lucas

“[I am] confident that Congress will pass the Kennedy-Hatch KidCare bill, a first step toward the single-payer socialized medicine system that the NEA [National Education Association] has endorsed for years.”

— Phyllis Schlafly

“The writer has to make pleasure for the reader - which, I think, is done by taking one's character's seriously and taking one's readers seriously -don't condescend or try to be tricky. Be a friend to your reader - I'd say that's a pretty good first step.”

— George Saunders

“We must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a World Government, patterned after our Own Government with a legislature, executive and judiciary and police.”

— Walter Cronkite

“Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.”

— Gloria Steinem

“Love won't come through unless the heart is open. To work with an open heart is to love or care for something or someone more than you do for yourself. This is the first step to the divine love that we all are looking for.”

— Harold Klemp

“We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.”

— William James

“The very first step in nonviolence is that we cultivate in our daily life, as between ourselves, truthfulness, humility, tolerance, loving kindness.”

— Mahatma Gandhi