Alas Quotes - Page 16

• Where are the marks of the cross in your life? Are there any points of identification with your Lord? Alas, too many Christians wear medals but carry no scars.

  Vance Havner

  Faith, Christian, Religious

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• I remember watching steak being cooked on TV and wanting to try it. As a special treat, my mother cooked it for me, and I thought this would be the time I would eat with a knife and fork. Alas, I ate it with chopsticks!

  Nobu Matsuhisa

  Mother, Knives, Special

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• Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

  George Eliot

  Selfish, Science, Obligation

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.483, Penguin

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• Alas, that we should be so unwilling to listen to the still and holy yearnings of the heart! A god whispers quite softly in our breast, softly yet audibly; telling us what we ought to seek and what to shun.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Heart, Holy, Should

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• Alas! how has the social spirit of Christianity been perverted by fools at one time, and by knaves and bigots at another; by the self-tormentors of the cell, and the all-tormentors of the conclave!

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Self, Cells, Knaves

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• It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!

  Charles Dickens

  Beautiful, Death, Memories

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• Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

  Honore de Balzac

  Character, Men, Two

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• One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.

  Rose Macaulay

  Time, Years, Done

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.), John Hamilton Cowper Johnson (1963). “Last letters to a friend, 1952-1958”

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• Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence.

  George MacDonald

  Self, Next, Sides

  George Macdonald (2016). “Sir Gibbie”, p.30, George Macdonald

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• Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.

  James Russell Lowell

  Truth, Taste, Tongue

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “My Study Windows”, p.107

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• Alas! we see that the small have always suffered for the follies of the great.
  [Fr., Helas! on voit que de tout temps
  Les Petits ont pati des sottises des grands.]

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Folly

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• Alas, why will a man spend months trying to hand over his liberty to a woman--and the rest of his life trying to get it back again?

  Helen Rowland

  Men, Hands, Trying

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• Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons, queens of higher mystery to the world beyond. . . . But alas, you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Queens, Husband, Women

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• Alas how difficult is it to preserve a high reputation!

  Publilius Syrus

  Reputation, Difficult, Preserves

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• Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

  Susan Sontag

  Independent, Dumb, Secret

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• Death is not rare, alas! nor burials few,
  And soon the grassy coverlet of God
  Spreads equal green above their ashes pale.

  Bayard Taylor

  Death, Ashes, Green

  Bayard Taylor (1867). “The Picture of St. John”, p.168

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• People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

  Margaret Millar

  Data, Ideas, People

  Margaret Millar (2016). “A Stranger in My Grave”, p.116, Soho Press

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• Think not you are charitable if the love of Jesus and His brethren be not purely the motive of your gifts. Alas! you might not give your superfluities, but "bestow all your goods to feed the poor;" you might even "give your body to be burned" for them, and yet be utterly destitute of charity, if self-seeking, self-pleasing or self-ends guide you; and guide you they must, until the love of God be by the Holy Ghost shed abroad in your heart.

  Hugh Reginald Haweis

  Jesus, Heart, Thinking

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• Alas! Much has been done of late to promote the production of dwarfish Christians. Poor, sickly believers turn the church into an hospital, rather than an army. Oh, to have a church built up with the deep godliness of people who know the Lord in their very hearts, and will seek to follow the Lamb wherever he goes!

  Charles Spurgeon

  Christian, Heart, Army

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• Virtue, vain word, futile shadow, slave of chance! Alas! I believe in thee!

  Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger

  Believe, Shadow, Chance

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• marrows - alas! - are arriving in a steady stream at the back door. ... Oddly enough, the majority of people who grow them in Fairacre say, as they hand them over: 'Funny thing! I don't care for them myself. In fact, none of the family likes them!' But still they plant them. It must be the fascination of seeing such a wonderful return for one small seed, that keeps marrow-growers at their dubious task.

  Miss Read

  Doors, Hands, Funny Things

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• We live at a time that is notable for the polemical nature of discussions about identity, consciousness, rationality, agency, memory, and feeling. 'New atheists' and reductive materialists conduct gladiatorial debates against defenders of faith and enemies of reductionism. Lots of heat is produced, but, alas, little light is shed. How marvelous it is, then, to see this fine new book by Lenn E. Goodman and Gregory Caramenico. Here is a learned, illuminating, and decidedly non-polemical treatment of the classic questions of soul, mind, and brain-an exemplary work of scholarship.

  Robert P. George

  Atheist, Memories, Book

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• Removing prejudices is, alas! too often removing the boundary of a delightful near prospect in order to let in a shockingly extensive one.

  Sir Fulke Greville

  Order, Prejudice, Boundaries

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• Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

  Nancy Mairs

  Writing, Practice, Riding

  Nancy Mairs (1994). “Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (woman) Writer”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• Place (or put) a spider on top of a mountain, it will only try to catch flies; alas, they are many those who, in the figurative meaning, have spider's eyes.

  African Spir

  Eye, Trying, Mountain

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 52), 1937.

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