Loss quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside loss — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form."
"Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life."
"I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on."
"When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss."
"California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension."
"No man profiteth but by the loss of others."
"I think that the loss of confidence in yourself to make good music is what being jaded is."
"No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother."
"Never risk your reputation on a single shot, for if you miss the loss is irreparable."
"Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life."
"For many people, illness - loss of health - represents the crisis situation that triggers an awakening. With serious illness comes awareness of your own mortality, the greatest loss of all."
"Each that we lose takes a part of us; A crescent still abides, Which like the moon, some turbid night, Is summoned by the tides."
"Endow the Living - with the Tears - You squander on the Dead."
"African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll."
"You discover the goal of existence by living it. The present is the only time when you can evolve, experience the divine, expand your awareness, or reach enlightenment. But this cannot be a haphazard journey that falters and wanders off the path. It's easy for that to happen when a crisis develops. Sudden losses and setbacks shake everyone up; those who keep moving forward are buoyed by knowing that their path cannot be destroyed, only interrupted."
"The evolution of the universe depends on the participation of each and every person. . . From your soul's perspective, you are as great an addition to the world as Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa, and subtracting you from the cosmic equation would be just as great a loss. The most exquisite silk remains intact if you pull out a thread, but the snag will show."
"You can find many philosophy papers on the themes of 'love' and 'friendship,' most of which are cheerful and somewhat anodyne; you don't find many on the loss of friends, relatives, and lovers from death or alienation, though it happens all the time."
"It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings."
"Losses are comparative; imagination only makes them of any moment."
"Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without."
