Life and misery began together. [ Proverb ]

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die. [ Wordsworth ]

To contemplation's sober eye.
Such is the race of man;
And they that creep, and they that fly.
Shall end where they began.
Alike the busy and the gay,
But flutter through life's little day. [ Gray ]

I am as free as nature first made man.
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran. [ Dryden ]

Proud Nimrod first the bloody chase began,
A mighty hunter, and his prey was man. [ Pope ]

The quiet night, now dappling, began to wane,
Dividing darkness from the dawning main. [ Byron ]

As this auspicious day began the race
Of every virtue join'd with every grace;
May you, who own them, welcome its return,
Till excellence, like yours, again is born.
The years we wish, will half your charms impair;
The years we wish the better half will spare;
The victims of your eyes will bleed no more,
But all the beauties of your mind adore. [ Jeffrey ]

Next, over his books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole.
How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug,
And sucked all over, like an industrious bug. [ Pope ]

At last the golden oriental gate
Of greatest heaven began to open fair;
And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,
Came dancing forth shaking his dewy hair,
And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy air. [ Spenser ]

Now began
Night with her sullen wing to double-shade
The desert; fowls in their clay nests were couched.
And now wild beasts came forth, the woods to roam. [ Milton ]

Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime
Pealed their first notes to sound the march of Time,
Thy joyous youth began - but not to fade -
When all thy sister planets have decayed; [ Thomas Campbell ]

They may rail at this life - from the hour I began it,
I've found it a life full of kindness and bliss;
And until they can show me some happier planet.
More social and bright, I'll content me with this. [ Moore ]

Then came your new friend: you began to change - I saw it and grieved. [ Tennyson ]

Then sculpture and her sister arts revived; stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live. [ Pope ]

Let the character as it began be preserved to the last; and let it be consistent with itself. [ Horace ]

A more glorious victory cannot be gained over another man than this, that when the injury began on his part, the kindness should begin on ours. [ Tillotson ]

Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men.... Everybody knows that Government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs. [ Wendell Phillips ]

When I beheld human affairs involved in such dense darkness, the guilty exulting in their prosperity, and pious men suffering wrong, what religion I had began to reel backward and fall. [ Claudius, Claudian ]

Government began in tyranny and force, in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way like a thunderstorm against the organised selfishness of human nature. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Wherever there is a sky above him and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for here too is man's existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavours; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. [ Carlyle ]

Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars - reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and - not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be seventy. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]