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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"When great loss happens - deaths close to you or your own approaching death - this is an opportunity for stepping completely out of identification with form and realizing the essence of who you are, or that the essence of anyone who is suffering or dying is beyond death."
"One could say that everybody in this world has a spiritual teacher. For most people, their losses and disasters represent the teacher; their suffering is the teacher."
"Frank went out for baseball and while he wasn't very good, it wasn't a total loss. The coach used him as a pattern to drawn the on-deck circle."
"My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn't come anymore, but I had his support."
"What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away."
"I don't think anything can prepare you for one's losses."
"I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés."
"Loss teaches you to figure things out as they come along."
"I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss."
"Alack our life, so beautiful to see, With how much ease life losest, in a day, What many years with pain and toil amassed!"
"I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there."
"Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist."
"The loss of a job may be the wake up-call needed to redeem the fire of your genius."
"A society that feels life is the most precious thing [jars against] a society that prefers death over theft, over loss of pride, over inconvenience, and so much else."
"no man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention, still less can he afford to take the consequences, including the vitiation of his temper and the loss of self control, yield to larger things to which you show no more than equal rights, and yield to lesser ones though clearly your own, better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right, not even killing the dog, will cure the bite"
"My father lifted me up in his strong gentle arms and said something I will never forget. He said, "I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can't do. We're going to climb that hill together even if it takes us all day." And at age 12 losing your leg pretty much seems like the end of the world. But as I climbed onto his back and we flew down the hill that day, I knew he was right. I knew I was going to be OK. You see, my father taught me that even our most profound losses are survivable. And it is what we do with that loss - our ability to transform it into a positive event."
"The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss."
"Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books."
"Losing money is a big loss, losing friends is greater than the loss, also lost all faith is lost"
"Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated."
