Quotes
Quotes about Loss
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as Presidential eligibility.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Be and not seem. A man is related to all nature. The less government we have the better. Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. To be great is to be misunderstood. Every man is in some way my superior. A man is a god in ruins. Life is a festival only to the wise. Knowledge is the only elegance. We boil at different degrees. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it. We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. What is the hardest thing in the world? To think. Accept your genius and say what you think. Make yourself necessary to somebody. The only way to have a friend is to be one. Insist on yourself; never imitate. Music causes us to think eloquently. To live without duties is obscene. It is not length of life, but depth of life. The greatest homage to truth is to use it. The only reward of virtue is virtue. Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. We become what we think about all day long. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. There is no knowledge that is not power. Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Heroism feels and never reasons and is therefore always right. A good indignation brings out all one's powers. A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect. Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Judge of your natural character by what you do in dreams. What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Our faith comes in moments, yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is merely through a transfer of idolatry. What lies beyond us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age. Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of somebody's enthusiasm. It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds. There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us. This gives force to the strong - that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action. -U.S. Poet.
I am a part of all you see In Nature: part of all you feel: I am the impact of the bee Upon the blossom; in the tree I am the sap--that shall reveal The leaf, the bloom--that flows and flutes Up from the darkness through its roots.
And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?
Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Use the losses and failures of the past as a reason for action, not inaction.
Fear of success can also be tied into the idea that success means someone else's loss. Some people are unconsciously guilty because they believe their victories are coming at the expense of another.
It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.
The art of losing isn't hard to masters; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient claws.
The nightingale appear'd the first, And as her melody she sang, The apple into blossom burst, To life the grass and violets sprang.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Frederick Buechner,'Whistling in the Dark' When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born, too of course, but at least for her it's a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what's happening. She becomes what's happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once. On the other side of a plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time. Even if he should decide to abandon it forever ten minutes later, the memory will nag him to the grave. He has seen the creation of the world. It has his mark on it. He has its mark on him. Both marks are, for better or for worse, indelible. All sons, like all daughters, are prodigals if they're smart. Assuming the Old Man doesn't run out on them first, they will run out on him if they are to survive, and if he's smart he won't put up too much of a fuss. A wise father sees all this coming, and maybe that's why he keeps his distance from the start. He must survive too. Whether they ever find their way home again, none can say for sure, but it's the risk he must take if they're ever to find their way at all. In the meantime, the world tends to have a soft spot in its heart for lost children. Lost fathers have to fend for themselves. Even as the father lays down the law, he knows that someday his children will break it as they need to break it if ever they're to find something better than law to replace it. Until and unless that happens, there's no telling the scrapes they will get into trying to lose him and find themselves. Terrible blnders will be made-dissapointments and failures, hurts and losses of every kind. And they'll keep making them even after they've found themselves too, of course, because growing up is a process that goes on and on. And every hard knock they ever get, knocks the father even harder still, if that's possible, and if and when they finally come through more or less in one piece at the end, there's maybe no rejoicing greater than his in all creation. -Fatherhood.
Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what's in a name?
If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can't go at dawn and not many places he can't go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walkingâone sport you shouldn't have to reserve a time and a court for.
Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev'ry text and gloss over Whate'er the crabbed'st author hath, He understood b' implicit faith.
The job of the poet is to render the world--to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
"What freedom does a starving man have?" The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.
Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.
When I behold what pleasure is Pursuit, What life, what glorious eagerness it is, Then mark how full Possession falls from this, How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit,-- I am perplext, and often stricken mute. Wondering which attained the higher bliss, The wing'd insect, or the chrysalis It thrust aside with unreluctant foot.
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
If heaven send no supplies, The fairest blossom of the garden dies.
