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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"And people really behaved in a fraudulent way or something, we'll go back and find the culprits later on. But that really isn't the problem we have. I mean that's where it came from, though. We leveraged up and if you have a 20 percent fall in value of a $20 trillion asset, that's $4 trillion. And when $4 trillion lands - losses land in the wrong part of this economy, it can gum up the whole place."
"The post-war loss of Churchill may have damaged the Western world with the same impact as the post-civil war world was damaged by the loss of Lincoln."
"Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song."
"Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field."
"Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities."
"Ambition, the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him."
"It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. That you were made of is metal to make virgins. Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found: by being ever kept, it is ever lost. ’Tis too cold a companion: away with ’t!"
"I can give the loser leave to chide."
"He hath disgrac'd me and hind'red me half a million; laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated my enemies. And what's his reason? I am a Jew."
"When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose."
"The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone"
"The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain."
"[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy."
"This is a bond nothing can ever loosen. What I have lost: what I possess forever."
"You can never get complacent because a loss is always around the corner."
"The world lost something when you died, Tod, and I know that wasn't easy for your family. But the world's loss was Kaylee's gain. I hope the two of you have the forever her mother and I never got. I will do my damnedest to make sure of that. I know you will."
"It would be stupid to confide your entire plan to one person. It’s infinitely smarter to give little pieces of it to each person working with you. That way, if someone betrays you, the loss isn’t too great."
"Curious, how each one of us secretly carries his private cemetery around with him and watches it filling up with ever new graves. The last one to be our own."
"The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being."
"It's almost weirder sometimes when you don't have a full life experience with someone's ups and downs, knowing what they've been through. Sometimes a loss that just comes out of left field rings in a very weird way when you have actually sort of relied on this small moment with this or that person, as a moment that actually has defined something for you in your life."
