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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"I could lecture on dry oak leaves; I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends."
"When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss."
"We don't sell wins or losses. The one thing you can't control in sports is which games you are going to win or which games you are going to lose. But what I could control was the experience the fans have."
"A venture not accomplished is loss; working together towards success is VICTORY!"
"I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford."
"I will compensate all your one-inch, two-inch losses because I know how important every inch is to you aged, decrepit men."
"What are you doing now?" Al questioned "Seeing if your circumcision is gone? It is. My expression went blank, and Trent hesitated. He looked at me, and I put a hand to my mouth, face flaming. "Oh. My. God. Trent. I'm sorry" "Um" Trent said, clearly at a loss. "Call me tomorrow," Al said seriously, "I've got a curse that will take care of that. Unless you like the snake in a turtleneck look"
"Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried."
"The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother's loss makes itself felt."
"Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love."
"The loss of a much-prized treasure is only half felt when we have not regarded its tenure as secure."
"General observations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater care and caution, lest, if we take counterfeit for true, our loss and shame be the greater when our stock comes to a severe scrutiny."
"We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain."
"The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul."
"I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold."
"The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain."
"I suppose while we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil; and while he has left us, others are coming into the world at the same time, and probably in this our territory. There is a continuous change, an ingress of beings into the world and an egress out of it."
"Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident."
"I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction."
"[John] Hughes is a great loss, I think. He was the first filmmaker that could look at someone who was young without seeing them as being less."
