Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
What took time for my mom was getting the pronouns right and calling me by a different name. Laverne was my middle name before I transitioned.
I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of ‘Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends’ as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn’t stop reading it.
I’m actually quite a nice person. It’s to do with the way I look, an uncompromising sort of face, brusque delivery and voice, and I think the combination of all that. When I’m doing pantomime, children will scream the place down before I open my mouth. There’s obviously something that really gets them.
I’m into creating something that I’ve never created before.
Teach success before teaching responsibility. Teach them to believe in themselves. Teach them to think, ‘I’m not stupid’. No child wants to fail. Everyone wants to succeed.
Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.
Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.
Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.
I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
Dig your well before you’re thirsty.
By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.
Change before you have to.
When I was playing before I retired, I never really understood the appreciation and the respect that people gave me. People had treated me like a god or something, and that was very embarrassing.
In 1986, Pakistan got the blasphemy law. So, while we had just two cases of blasphemy before that year, now we have thousands. It shows that one should be careful while bringing religion into legislation, because the law itself can become an instrument of persecution.
There’s only so far you can go before you say enough is enough.
I will never tire of recommending the custom, practiced by the best architects, of preparing not only drawings and sketches, but also models of wood or any other material. These… enable us to examine… the work as a whole… and, before continuing any further, to estimate the likely trouble and expense.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Sometimes something’s got to happen before something is going to happen.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.
I threw up before every single football game I played, and I did so up through my NFL career. It was good pressure. It was pressure to be good. It was pressure to be the best. It was pressure to want to win.
The best time to make friends is before you need them.
I pray to God every day that he makes me the biggest superstar, but before that, I ask God to make me a good actor. Being a star is hard, but being an actor is even harder. I want to be both before I am done.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.
Before we can know God and understand his great plan it is first necessary for us to believe that he exists and that he rewards all who diligently seek him.
I visualize things in my mind before I have to do them. It’s like having a mental workshop.
Before the reward there must be labor. You plant before you harvest. You sow in tears before you reap joy.
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.
I like people to really get a feel for the house before they do anything to it.
Before a show, you might have aches or pains, or it’s a bad rainy day, or it’s too humid. We all complain about stuff. But… how do I put this poetically? Once it’s the roar of the crowd and the smell of the greasepaint, forget it. Once the adrenaline kicks in and your chest expands, you forget about all that.
One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.
The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.
Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I’m done.
When you wake up each morning, you can choose to be happy or choose to be sad. Unless some terrible catastrophe has occurred the night before, it is pretty much up to you. Tomorrow morning, when the sun shines through your window, choose to make it a happy day.
I’m not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
The groups I liked, you really looked forward to their albums and you rushed to get them the first day, because you knew it was going to be different than what they did before. The records told you what that group was into at that time.
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn’t see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more.
I’ve been offered political shows before, and I don’t know anything about politics and I feel uncomfortable making political opinions – there’s consequences to them. I often think I’m wrong, so I really don’t like getting in political or religious discussions because of the giant possibility that I might be wrong.
Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.
Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.
I do not want war. I am not seeking revenge, even though I can see before my eyes the great sacrifices made by the Ukrainian people. I am seeking peace and will achieve Ukraine’s unity.
I’d like to see Paris before I die… Philadelphia will do.
Life is half spent before we know what it is.
Before I had my child, I thought I knew all the boundaries of myself, that I understood the limits of my heart. It’s extraordinary to have all those limits thrown out, to realize your love is inexhaustible.
Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.
My eventual goal is to win a championship. And before I retire, I just want to win a championship. That’s it.
Before ‘Titanic,’ yes, I had done some things and, yes, I had been nominated for an Academy Award, but I had never been sort of world-famous. And I suppose, yes, I am really famous now. But I feel embarrassed to say that because it’s just a bit daft for me.
Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?
More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations.
The height of my goals will not hold me in awe, though I may stumble often before they are reached.
I am the type where I don’t worry about anything else but how to top what I did yesterday. My main goal is to top what I did before.
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
