Alas Quotes - Page 2

• A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Bankers, Sound, Investing

  "The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse of Money Values" (1931)

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• Alas, I have done nothing this day! What?! Have you not lived? It is not only the fundamental but the noblest of your occupations.

  James O'Donnell Bennett

  Life, Fundamentals, Done

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• I loved dancing with a delirious 'I wish I could die' passion, especially when the music appealed to me ... but alas! only one in ten partners had any notion of time, and what made it worse, the nine were always behind, never before the beat. ... Sometimes I would firmly seize smaller, lighter partners by the scruff of the neck, so to speak, and whirl them along in the way they should go, but I saw they were not enjoying themselves, and oddly enough I wanted these wretches to like dancing with me.

  Ethel Smyth

  Dance, Passion, Dancing

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• I fear I must agree," Magnus murmured. He pressed a hand over his heart and his new peacock-blue waistcoast. "I strive to find some respect in my heart for you, but alas! It seems an impossible quest.

  Cassandra Clare

  Heart, Blue, Hands

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• Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch's ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels—but alas! We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams, By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth.

  Alan Judd

  Dream, Art, Philosophy

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• Alas, why are my nights all thus lost? Ah, why do I ever miss his sight whose breath touches my sleep?

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Sleep, Night, Sight

  Rabindranath Tagore, William Radice (2011). “Gitanjali: Song Offerings”, p.180, Penguin Books India

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• Nothing is more common than for men to make partial and absurd distinctions between vices of equal enormity, and to observe some of the divine commands with great scrupulousness, while they violate others, equally important, without any concern, or the least apparent conciousness of guilt. Alas, it is only wisdom which perceives this tragedy.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Important, Tragedy

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• In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

  Barbara Amiel

  World, Common, Crime

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• Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

  Jessica Mitford

  Beautiful, Memories, Order

  Jessica Mitford (2011). “The American Way of Death Revisited”, p.43, Vintage

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• She dreams of him that has forgot her love; You dote on her that cares not for your love. 'Tis pity love should be so contrary; And thinking of it makes me cry 'alas!

  William Shakespeare

  Dream, Love You, Thinking

  William Shakespeare (1996). “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare”, p.208, Wordsworth Editions

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• It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.

  Orson Scott Card

  Love, Fighting, Museums

  Orson Scott Card (2010). “Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker”, p.236, Macmillan

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• This source of corruption, alas, is inherent in the democratic system itself, and it can only be controlled, if at all, by finding ways to encourage legislators to subordinate ambition to principle.

  James L. Buckley

  Ambition, Way, Principles

  James L. Buckley (2010). “Freedom at Risk: Reflections on Politics, Liberty, and the State”, p.245, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

  Marcel Proust

  Memories, Regret, Years

  Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, ePenguin

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• Alas...I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?

  Voltaire

  Beautiful, Heart, Kissing

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• Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Gossip, Poison, Whispering

  'Christabel' pt. 2 (1800) (l. 408)

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• And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  England, Graves, Mets

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Elegy In A Country Churchyard”

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• A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Music, Death, Winning

  Oliver Wendell Holmes (1859). “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table ...”, p.355

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• No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

  Erica Jong

  Thinking, Race, Track

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• All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

  T. E. Lawrence

  Details, Ornaments, World

  Letter to Bruce Rogers, August 20, 1931.

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• We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Independence, Mind

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• Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

  Pat Conroy

  Art, Media, Land

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• God has a plan for His Church upon earth. But alas! we too often make our plan, and we think that we know what ought to be done. We ask God first to bless our feeble efforts, instead of absolutely refusing to go unless God go before us.

  Andrew Murray

  Thinking, Effort, Church

  Andrew Murray (2009). “Absolute Surrender”, p.39, Moody Publishers

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• Nay! Alas for us all! And for all that walk in the world in these after-days. For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream. But I count you blessed [...] for your loss you suffer of your own free will, and you might have chosen otherwise. But you have not forsaken your companions, and the least reward that you shall have is that the memory of Lothlórien shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart, and shall neither fade nor grow stale.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Running, Memories, Blessed

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.267, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Pride, Greatness, Men

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2003). “Brothers Karamazov”, p.427, Bantam Classics

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• I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas, how many yearning thoughts, what great desire, have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?

  Dante Alighieri

  Fate, Sorrow, Desire

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