Top 100 First Things Quotes
#1. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
Thomas Sowell
#2. One of the first things I picked up when I was very, very young out of a record store was work from Peter Saville - the early things he used to do for Factory Records.
Raf Simons
#4. People say to me, 'Do you dye your hair?' and I say, 'Well, does f**king Siouxsie Sioux? Does Bowie?'. Of course I'm going to have a decent haircut. It's one of the first things I learnt to do - get a few songs together and get your hairstyle right.
Johnny Marr
#5. On My First Driving Lesson First things first: A car has five gears. What is that smell? ... Okay, first thing before that first thing: Farting in a car that's not moving makes you an asshole.
Justin Halpern
#6. Once I had a boy in here whose name was Liam. One of the first things he told me was that I couldn't make him do anything he didn't want. He wasn't going to do any work for me. He wasn't going to listen to a single thing I said.
Torey L. Hayden
#7. Most of the things I do brand wise are both missionary and mercenary in their position, and that's really important to me; that's one of the first things I look at when I say, 'does it make sense to do a deal?'
Mike Rowe
#8. Funding for sports (and the arts) are often the first things facing the chop in difficult times.
Lucy Powell
#9. I didn't start sweating until I had children. That was one of the first things I realized when my daughter Violet was born - I started getting wicked BO. You know there's a difference between basketball BO and stress BO? This was definitely stress BO. Like, new dad BO.
Dave Grohl
#10. Media is extraordinarily important and is an extraordinarily powerful tool. There's a reason that the first things that a rebellion or revolt will take is the media. The story you transmit is the story that becomes a given, or the narrative of a country and people.
Dan Gilroy
#11. One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Thomas Merton
#12. The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.
Anthony Browne
#13. There are several different kinds of painful feelings that we might experience, and learning to distinguish and relate to these feelings of discomfort or pain is an important part of meditation practice, because it is one of the very first things that we open to as our practice develops.
Jack Kornfield
#14. I want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist.
It's possible that he is already aware, if only in a 'don't step on the small girl' kind of way.
Laini Taylor
#15. If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
Aldous Huxley
#16. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. "Just keep learning," the old woman said.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#17. Betrayal always comes wrapped up in a friendly cloak. It's one of the first things I learned in the Senate.
Kevin Hearne
#18. One of the first things I did on arriving at school was to break my left arm falling into a bomb crater.
Peter Higgs
#19. Habit 1: Be Proactive Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind Habit 3: Put First Things First Habit 4: Think Win/Win Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood Habit 6: Synergize Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Stephen Covey
#20. When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.
Sarah Hall
#21. One of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that "fat" in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#22. First things first: A clean house simply looks better than a messy house. A room where everything has its place is nicer than a room filled with chaotic stacks and clutter. If you want your house to look nicer and have a better ambiance, the first and simplest thing you can do is to clean.
Katie Sawyer
#23. The first things people always ask are,
why?
And how?
But not with me.
I don't want to do anything.
I don't want to be anything.
I want to disappear elegantly.
I want people to look for my goodbye note
and find nothing but smoke.
Lora Mathis
#24. The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don't know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.
Henry A. Kissinger
#25. Pro wrestling has always been ingrained into American culture. It was one of the first things that was ever on television, so everybody watched it.
CM Punk
#26. One of the first things Catholic school taught me is that babies were born sinners. You sucked before you took your first breath.
Lizz Winstead
#27. When I married Wilnelia, one of the first things I wanted to know about Puerto Rico was the quality of the golf courses.
Bruce Forsyth
#28. The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.
Neil Gaiman
#29. I don't think about my mom when I'm onstage. I just don't really think about my kids when I'm working, and when we press stop and I walk outside, they're the first things I think about.
Jack White
#30. First things first has always been my motto, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense - after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble minded, not to provide any actual meaning.
Jeff Lindsay
#31. One of the first things I said when I signed on for the show was No hugs! Full House was all based on hugs.
Bob Saget
#32. One of the first things a typical lesbian learns is that there is no such thing as a typical lesbian.
Yvonne Zipter
#33. Well, one of the first things is to restore the rule of law, to place the government back under the cage of law. Another thing is to stop falling for the myth of democracy.
James Bovard
#34. In America one of the first things done in a new State is to make the post go there; in the forests of Michigan there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild, but that letters and newspapers arrive at least once a week.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#35. In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed.
Noah Webster
#36. One of the very first things students in intro psychology, statistics, or economics courses learn is how to "clean up the data.
Shawn Achor
#37. Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It's one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It's a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.
Anthony Bourdain
#38. Works of genius are the first things in the world.
John Keats
#39. One of the first things you and your fiance need to develop is a meaningful prayer life even before the wedding. My wife, Shirley, and I did that, and the time we have spent on our knees has been the stabilizing factor throughout nearly forty years of marriage.
James Dobson
#40. Is an 'idea' an advance visualization of a piece? Part of a piece? If anything - if it hasn't already evaporated - it's one of the very first things sacrificed during the actual process of making something.
Judith Schaechter
#41. If you seek eternity and light and luminosity, seek humility first ... first things first.
Frederick Lenz
#42. From when I was really young one of the first things I did was to perform and do shows. It was like a natural instinct.
Colin Morgan
#43. One of the first things electric I ever saw was a guitar. I was living in a house with no electricity until, at 7, we moved to a house that had it. It had electric lights, but the previous owners had even taken the light bulbs with them when they moved.
George Benson
#44. These mountains and their caves are made from the stuff of the oldest stories (this was long before human-people, of course; whatever made you imagine that people were the first things to tell stories?),
Neil Gaiman
#45. No, I can tell you one of the first things that happens to a home secretary when they arrive in the job is that they are given a briefing about the security matters that they will be dealing with and I deal with security matters on a daily basis.
Theresa May
#46. I like listening to old soul music. I like Sam Cooke. When I was growing up, the first things I was listening to was Whitney Houston and Cher. They were really big inspirations for me.
Rebecca Ferguson
#47. For better or worse, a lot of people's images are based on the first things that are written about them. You can't control what people write about you, so - good or bad - I have never lost sleep about it.
Andrew Luck
#48. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
C.S. Lewis
#49. I think one of the first things to go as people's lives start to go down is their dreams. Dreams should be the last thing to go - dreams are the things you go down with. If you're left clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean, I'd put on it the word dreams.
Kevin Costner
#50. Successful people know they need to get many things done-and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate their time and energy on doing one thing at a time-and on doing first things firs.
Peter Drucker
#51. Not long ago I heard a Navy chaplain refer to the sage advice of the Apostle to put first things first ... If we are to heed the admonition to put first things first ... one of the main essentials which lies at the very beginning of civilization is that of security.
Calvin Coolidge
#52. One of the first things they teach you in Driver's Ed is where to put your hands on the steering wheel. They tell you put 'em at ten o'clock and two o' clock. Never mind that . I put mine at 9:45 and 2:17. Gives me an extra half hour to get where I'm goin'.
George Carlin
#53. As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
Thomas Sowell
#54. Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.
Stephen Covey
#55. The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#56. She had not thought of them as "fat," though. She had thought of them as "big," because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that "fat" in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like "stupid" or "bastard," and not a mere description like "short" or "tall.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#57. Male and female are the first things we learn because they represent the polarity of existence.
Frederick Lenz
#58. One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.
Pete Hamill
#59. First things first: Marie Antoinette never said, 'Let them eat cake.' Those words were attributed to an earlier French Queen, Marie-Therese, the wife of the Sun King Louis XIV. By 1767---a year in which Marie Antoinette was still an innocent German-speaking twelve-year-old in Austria....
Kris Waldherr
#60. One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position of have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don't say as what you do say.
Fredrik Backman
#61. In martial arts one of the first things that you learn is to be balanced. Balance is the central principle in architecture and design. Balance is a way of trying to talk about being at the center of things.
Frederick Lenz
#62. Education to me is the most important thing that we've got going in this country. I mean, a lot of my family are teachers. I was the recipient of a great public education, and I see that's one of the first things that we're going to go, 'What are we going to raise?' The ignorant masses.
Craig T. Nelson
#63. One of the first things we found out was that the Warren Commission never pursued a conspiracy investigation.
Louis Stokes
#64. One of the first things was I made Arlo [the Apatosaurus] a younger character. And then when I was that age (around 11 or 12), what was I like? Sweat pants, turtle-neck kid; didn't know anything about fashion or style, the culture of the world. I was very sheltered.
Peter Sohn
#65. The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'
Gabe Newell
#66. The first things I did was I was a writer, painter, and photographer, and we grew up very poor, so even though I could get into any college I wanted, there was no way to pay for it.
Lori Petty
#67. Vaccination is one of the easiest things on the way to development. It's much easier than roads and a great education system. It's very basic. It's one of the first things you want to get right.
Bill Gates
#68. The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#69. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
Peter Thiel
#70. To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male and to me that's obvious. All right, so I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."
Quentin Tarantino
#71. I don't fall in love easily. It's odd; one of the first things I think about when I go out with a woman is what it would be like to be married to her. And yet I have a tough time committing.
Matt Dillon
#72. They'd get that back; when children no longer lived in fear and privation, the ability to hope was one of the first things to return. From
Mercedes Lackey
#73. One of the first things you ever learn as a stand-up is don't show fear.
Bob Newhart
#74. One of the first things that surprised me in a positive, wonderfully positive way, is that this works - patient capital works.
Jacqueline Novogratz
#75. One of the first things I did was interview the President of the United States. Some people work their whole lives and can't interview someone of that stature.
Maria Menounos
#76. Ok first things first I'll eat your brains Then Imma start rockin gold teeth & fangs
Nicki Minaj
#77. How can you expect to be rescued if you don't put first things first and act proper?
William Golding
#78. First things were good, last things not so much so.
Kate Atkinson
#79. To be a successful missionary one must have the Spirit of the Lord. We are also taught that the Spirit will not dwell in unclean tabernacles. Therefore, one of the first things a missionary must do to gain spirituality is to make sure his own personal life is in order.
Ezra Taft Benson
#80. Hansen: I do not look back because I cannot change the past. You should not, either. That is one of the first things you must learn as a hunter - do not regret what you do not have.
Ruby Dixon
#81. One of the first things we have to let go of is not being able to let go of anybody.
Merrit Malloy
#82. Most people, when they meet me, one of the first things they say is, 'Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to war? Why would you go into these places where you know there's a risk of getting killed?'
Lynsey Addario
#83. One of the first things that you learn as a stand-up is, you're the boss. It's your stage, and don't screw with me because I'll make you look bad, which I had to do, because you wind up with drunks and loud people.
Bob Newhart
#84. Be a shadow, Hunter. Can you be a shadow? It was one of the first things he'd learned from his father.
He's been six.
Brigid Kemmerer
#85. I don't know if you look back on your life and just see successes, but probably the first things that pop up are the regrets.
Stephen Malkmus
#86. First things, first frame the right questions before answering them, ensure doing the right things before doing things right.
Pearl Zhu
#87. - You are better, do not worry - she said. - In fact, when we light up our inner light, the first things we see are the cobwebs and dust, our weak points. They were there all the time, only you saw nothing in the darkness. Now it will be easier to cleanse your soul.
Paulo Coelho
#88. One of the first things I discovered when I became an agent was that I couldn't afford an imagination any more
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#89. The first things I saw upon dying were Persephone's breasts and nipples. Or at least one nipple, but there was definitely a nipple.
Something seemed wrong about that being the first thing I saw in the afterlife.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#90. That is one of the first things my family, my mother and my grandfather, had taught me about acting: 'Use your eyes!' Not being able to do that physical aspect of it, and having to put it all into your voice? That was a little bit of a challenge.
Keith Coogan
#91. One of the first things I do with people is help them figure out what their limiting beliefs are and then encourage them to question, "Well, do I really want to keep that one? Is it limiting me? Does it not fit me? Is it holding me back?"
Deborah King
#92. Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
Stephen Covey
#93. The word priority was singular for 500 years - what does priorities mean - 'many many first things.'
Greg McKeown
#94. I look back at history, and some of the worst governments we've ever had, you know one of the first things they ever did? They went after the trade unions.
Sherrod Brown
#95. The more I work on loving Jesus, the easier it becomes to love my family. Maybe it's really a matter of putting first things first. When we love the way of Jesus first, we're then sufficiently equipped to love our families.
Philip Gulley
#96. One of the first things I look for in a woman I meet is a sense of humor, a sort of light acceptance of the world and the people who live in it.
Adam West
#97. I think the first things that are relevant are that things should work well; they should function.
Robin Day
#98. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in:
Put second things first and we lose both first things and second things.
Jim George
#99. One of the first things I bought when I made 'Roseanne Show' money was a farm in Iowa.
Roseanne Barr
#100. You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.
Douglas Coupland
