Top 100 Before Us Quotes
#1. Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.
Miranda July
#2. When we rise in the morning ... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#3. The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.
Was this the heart I wanted measured?
Victor LaValle
#4. Before we pray that God would fill us, I believe we ought to pray that He would empty us.
Dwight L. Moody
#5. What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it's too late?
Elizabeth Gilbert
#6. Whether we speak of the death to self or a sinking down in humility and meekness before God or faith in the Lamb of God, it all means one thing - a deliverance from self to find our liberty and our blessedness in the living sacrifice of ourselves for all around us. THE END
Andrew Murray
#7. As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we're really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.
David Levithan
#8. [I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love with these guys, then puts our hearts in harm's way. It's lovely and ghastly and extremely powerful. His best yet.
Katherine Dunn
#9. All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.
Carl Jung
#10. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us - or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#11. Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.
Chang-rae Lee
#12. Know that tomorrow will bring clarity where before was only fog. In the final summation, it is not other's expectations that slay us, but our over compensatory reactions in regard
C.B. Smith
#13. Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?
Paul Craig Roberts
#14. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
E. O. Wilson
#15. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.
G.K. Chesterton
#16. A movie playing on the TV screen in front of us. Some sort of bad Tom Cruise drama. I've never liked Tom Cruise. He always reminded me of someone's creepy cousin, who smiles too big before he touches your butt and whispers something gross in your ear with hot whiskey breath.
Erin McCarthy
#17. But, oh, to bum in our secret heart while we blaze before the eyes of others I This is the work .of the Spirit of God. Work it in us, O adorable Comforter!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#18. When you look at golf films before us they're all - garbage or satire. A lot of sports films tend to vilify the opposition. Where the opposition becomes this big angry monster, so big you can't beat him.
Shia Labeouf
#19. Twice or thrice had I loved thee before I knew thy face or name, so in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, angels affect us oft, and worshiped be.
John Donne
#20. But my relief that David Auburn's Proof is less about its ballyhooed higher mathematics than the fragility of life and love was matched by my delight in his fine and tender play. ( ... ) Proof surprises us with its aliveness and intelligent modesty, and we have not met these characters before.
John Heilpern
#21. We need to learn ourselves before we can understand what really annoys us!
Auliq Ice
#22. There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.
Charlotte Bronte
#23. Sometimes, to overcome a hurdle before us, we don't need to search for new truth or understanding of God so much as we need to live out what we already know.
Amy Layne Litzelman
#24. We know well and we know chronically ill, but there is a whole bunch of gray in between where I think we can heal people before they become chronically sick. I believe our thoughts make us sick.
Marie Osmond
#25. I believe that nothing is more important to our ability to effectively address our present than understanding the lessons learned from those who have come before us.
Charlie Gonzalez
#26. The Lord speaks to us through the Scriptures and in our prayer. Let us learn to keep silence before him, as we meditate upon the Gospel.
Pope Francis
#27. Before the tears that tore us, when our history was before us.
Lang Leav
#28. Should we act on our unseen fears before the virtue of human kindness? Who's given us more, the Light's faith or that stranger? And if you choose to reject generosity, then what standing do we have left in this world, or in the hereafter, for that matter?
Janny Wurts
#29. My hope for all of us is that 'the miles we go before we sleep' will be filled with all the feelings that come from deep caring
delight , sadness, joy, wisdom
and that in all the endings of our life, we will be able to see the new beginnings.
Fred Rogers
#30. Paul is Starsky, and I met him before shooting. He was very kind and encouraged us to go with what we wanted to do. It was very sweet to see them back with the car after 25 years.
Ben Stiller
#31. Perfection may be an impossible goal, but habits help us to do better. Making headway toward a good habit, doing better than before, saves us from facing the end of another year with the mournful wish, once again, that we'd done things differently.
Gretchen Rubin
#32. Long before we discovered mirrors and photographs, our mothers' reflections provided us with the earliest glimpses of our female identity.
Debra Evans
#33. That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way as us.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#34. Oh what a long time we shall not be and the world will endure,
Neither name nor sign of us will exist;
Before this we were not and there was no deficiency,
After this, when we are not it will be the same as before.
Omar Khayyam
#35. There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
James Thurber
#36. To comprehend the Wisdom of this Injunction the better, and explain the Duty before us, it should be considered, that Government is the only Means by which human Happiness can be attained.
Charles Inglis
#37. The only question which concerns us here is whether these "educated" persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor.
Carter G. Woodson
#38. Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before ... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself.
Gloria Vanderbilt
#39. If we realize our responsibility before God for our life, we will understand how valuable time is for us.
Sunday Adelaja
#40. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.
P.J. Parker
#41. There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#42. The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet.
John Ashbery
#43. The road before us is shorter than the road behind.
Lucy Stone
#44. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.
Dan Simmons
#45. Most of us know when we are about to react emotionally. We can feel it. Often there is a brief warning before the amygdala hijack. For some of us, it is butterflies in the stomach; for some, it is an increased heart rate, and for others, it is a feeling of agitation.
Elizabeth Thornton
#46. When life knocks us down, God CAN put us back together again. He can meet us in our brokenness and restore us to something even more glorious than we were before we were shattered.
Heather Hart
#47. Part of the problem is words. The fact that there are separate words for HE and SHE, HIM and HER. I've never thought about it before, how divisive this is. Like maybe if there was just one pronoun for all of us, we wouldn't get so caught on that difference.
David Levithan
#48. At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes, we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life, we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.
Alexander Pope
#49. He nodded like he felt sorry for me and my stupid brain. 'I think that's probably because of your common sense. You can't accept the idea of arriving before you leave, the idea that every moment is happening at the same time, that it's us who are moving - ' Enough was enough.
Rebecca Stead
#50. We knew before we came (to earth) that there would be many adverse circumstances to test us: accidents, sickness, and disease to prove us; temptations and distractions to try us; disappointments, discouragements, reverses, failures and all kinds of situations to determine our character.
Robert E. Wells
#51. I've said before that the Ryder Cup is not the European Tour versus the American Tour. It's Europe's best golfers against the US.
Lee Westwood
#52. Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence.
J.D. Salinger
#53. We have to be diligent in serving God and in fulfilling the task set before us by Him
Sunday Adelaja
#54. I'd never considered myself to be that ambitious or driven before, yet I stood there waiting for us to roll out through the start line knowing that taking part wasn't enough. I wanted to be a racer, not just a finisher.
David Millar
#55. Before it began to open new wounds, the war healed quite a few old ones: it shook us out of our lethargy, our life took on new meaning, we no longer lived without a purpose, eating and sleeping and excreting like animals.
Costas Taktsis
#56. As we travel again between life and death,
Waking and dream, blinking, while layers within layers,
None better, none worse, unravel and knit up before us ...
Jay Woodman
#57. Even before I had had time to really think things through, I realized we must not forget. If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years.
Simon Wiesenthal
#58. Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look around.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#59. The ladder had always held us before, we thought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time.
Stephen King
#60. The fire that hollows us out is what allows us to be filled with strength and power where before there was none.
Morgan Rhodes
#61. Each day is a lifetime. In the morning we are born. The day lies before us: vast and bright and new.
Michael Leunig
#63. Often times God wants us to sit before Him in quietness. He doesn't want us to do all the talking. As Is. 30:15 says "In quiet and confidence will be your strength."
Charles Stanley
#64. It's easy to have a great attitude when things are going our way ... It's when difficult challenges rise before us ... that attitude becomes the difference maker.
John C. Maxwell
#65. The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, "How have I found myself here?" It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.
Lorrie Moore
#66. It's about us getting ready to play. It's not about the other team. We'll beat ourselves before they beat us. That's always our approach.
Pete Carroll
#67. Identity. It's always God's first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
#68. In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.
Douglas Coupland
#69. Sevro lands dramatically before us, spraying us with sand. His ghostCloak ripples away. "Bloodydamn shithole." I
Pierce Brown
#70. We have to allow God to do a work in us before He can do a work through us.
Wendy Pope
#71. Pooley hunched closer to his pint. 'A pox on it all,' said he. 'The Swan packed full of these idiots, old Soap flushed away round the proverbial S-bend and Cowboy Night looming up before us with about as much promise as the coming of Ragnorok!
Robert Rankin
#72. We are born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beings that pass before us like shadows will stay in our presence forever.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#73. Before we begin, I want your word that much of what I show you tonight stays between us.
Ronald Malfi
#74. It was truly a lesson in don't take something at face value. You know, so many of us do in life. Whether it's because of how somebody looks or because of what they're wearing or what have you, you kind of assess a person in the first five minutes before they even speak.
Shemar Moore
#75. Passion begins with a burden and a split-second moment, when you understand something like never before. That burden is on those who know. Those who don't know are at peace. Those of us who do know get disturbed and are forced to take action.
Wangari Maathai
#76. My original fear that my daughter was going to die before BettyJane and myself has now been replaced with the fear that she is going to outlive us.
JohnA Passaro
#77. Perfectly good sex?" Cam interrupted us, drawing both our gazes. His voice was low with some unnamed emotion. "Abstain?" His now heated eyes ran the length of me before returning to meet mine. "Then he isn't doing it right.
Samantha Young
#79. So when the book came out, my mother stunned us all by leaving my father. I think three months before the book came out, she left my father the day he retired from the Marine Corps. They had a parade and march, and she came home and left.
Terry Gross
#80. Let's chow, and then we'll get our books," Tony said. Just as the door was about to close behind us, he added, "You act like you've never had food before.
Rebecca Maizel
#81. The Bill of Rights existed long before President Obama was elected, and as long as I'm a U.S. Senator, I will fight to protect the basic rights and liberties that belong to all of us as American citizens.
Rand Paul
#82. Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I had better news for you but we are facing a storm that most of us have feared. This is a threat that we've never faced before.
Ray Nagin
#83. When faced by any loss, there's no point in trying to recover what has been, it's best to take advantage of the large space that opens up before us and fill it with something new.
Paulo Coelho
#84. You told us over and over that you don't think you could live without books, but the ironic thing is, you'd probably die before you'd think to rip pages out of one to start a fire. Am I right?
Well, get over it already. Better to be warm then well-read.
Wendelin Van Draanen
#85. To awaken a new longing for holiness: this is the great pastoral challenge that we have before us, if we want to be faithful to God's plan and also to respond to the yearnings and hopes of the peoples of America and of all peoples on earth ...
Crescenzio Sepe
#86. We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us, as well as those who will care for us in old age or ill health.
Tony Judt
#87. Valuing creeds, confessions, and catechism is kneeling down in humility to the wisdom of the past and confessing our connectedness to the communion of saints before us and to the Head of the body.
Mathew B. Sims
#88. Time doesn't give us the Time to fix our all mistake, We would have to fix all that before the Time
Samar Sudha
#89. At 78 years old, I am not surprised at much anymore. Germany has taken divergent positions before, so has France, so has England, so has the US.
Donald Rumsfeld
#90. Of all the people who came before us, Magda, you were the only one who represented truth. I want you to know that. - Councilman Sadler
Terry Goodkind
#91. When there are wars within us, it will not be long before we are at war with others, even those we love.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#92. It has been said there was a cross in the heart of God long before the cross was erected at Calvary. As we think about it we will be overwhelmed at the wonder and greatness of His love for us.
Billy Graham
#93. What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self).
David Brooks
#94. We incessantly vacillate between what's behind us and what's before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#95. I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: "Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality," and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment.
Pico Iyer
#96. Here before us was sufficient evidence to show that it really was an entrance to a tomb, and by the seals, to all outward appearances that it was intact.
Howard Carter
#97. Come, everyone! Clap your hands! Shout to God with joyful praise! 2 For the LORD Most High is awesome. He is the great King of all the earth. 3 He subdues the nations before us, putting our enemies beneath our feet.
Anonymous
#98. As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, forgetful delight, nor with the quickness of impulsive thoughtlessness . But let us go out with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us.
Oswald Chambers
#99. Grief will go
it always does
but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life.
Andrew Sean Greer
#100. After 9/11, we had to look at the world differently. After 9/11, we had to recognize that when we saw a threat, we must take it seriously before it comes to hurt us. In the old days we'd see a threat, and we could deal with it if we felt like it or not. But 9/11 changed it all.
George W. Bush
