The most important stage of any enterprise is the beginning.

-Plato
Republic, bk.2, 377b (translated by R Waterfield,1993).

On a dit que la beaute¤   est une promesse de bonheur. Inversement, la possibilite¤   du plaisir peut e"  tre un commencement de beaute¤  . It has been said that beauty is a guarantee of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be the beginning of beauty.

-Proust, Marcel
' 1923  A la recherche du temps perdu,'La Prisonni e' re'.

This is not the end of anything. This is the beginning of everything.

-Reagan, Ronald Wilson
  On his re-election. In Time, Nov.

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.Like whentheysay 'Asit wasin the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end'.

-Rhys,Jean pseudonym of  Ellen Gwendolen Rees Williams
  Voyage in the Dark, ch.4, pt.1.

There is no'beginning'of feminism in the sense that there is no beginning to defiance in women.

-Rowbotham, Sheila
  Women, Resistance and Revolution, ch.1.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

-Sandburg, Carl
Quoted inTheComplete Poems of Carl Sandburg (1986),'Notes for a Preface'.

Voila'   le commencement de la fin. This is the beginning of the end.

-Benevento
Attributed.

Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end.

-Whymper, Edward
Scrambles Amongst theAlps.

For the beginning is assuredly the endösince we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

-Williams,William Carlos
  Paterson, bk.1, preface.