Quotes about loss
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“Jace shook his head. 'I don't care if I did just set myself on fire,' he said. 'I'm not hugging you.'
Simon sighed and dropped his arms. 'Your loss,' he said. 'If you'd gone in, I would've let you, but honestly it would have been a pity hug.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Jace Herondale and Simon Lewis, pg. 454
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

“They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Misattributed Source: Robert McAfee Brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McAfee_Brown. Preface for the 25th anniversary edition of Night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_%28book%29. Page v, Bantam Books paperback; 1982 reissue edition.

Pain, People, Suffering

“The sense of loss is such a tricky one, because we always feel like our worth is tied up into stuff that we have, not that our worth can grow with things we are willing to lose.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Feeling, Sense

“The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

“Our world was created with a sense of order. For every loss, there is a gain. Sometimes we are so blinded by the loss that we don't see the gain, don't recognize the gift.”

Debbie Macomber (1948) American writer

World, Sense

“He was a great poet" They lamented.

No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?”

Lloyd Alexander book The Kestrel

Source: The Kestrel

“He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Pleasure, World

“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise human science is at a loss.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Question, Decision, Science

“Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Beauty

“I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Pain, Cry

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Art, Forgetting, Moving On

“There are memories that time does not erase… Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Memory, Time

“But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Life, Fear

“Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.”

Orson Scott Card book Xenocide

Source: Xenocide

“The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

Life, World, Idea

“Even across the dark, even across the loss, even across the emptiness, soul will speak to soul”

Catherine Fisher (1957) Welsh children's writer

Source: The Dark City

Soul

“Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Death, People, Thinking

“With no loss or sacrifice, we can't appreciate what we have.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Variant: With endless time, nothing is special. With no loss or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have
Source: The Time Keeper

“Accept loss forever”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

"Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" in a letter to Arabelle Porter (28 May 1955); published in Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956 (1995) and in a letter to Don Allen (1958); published in Heaven & Other Poems (1977)
Variant: Accept loss forever

“Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Quest

Source: Fool's Quest

“Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.”

Caleb Carr (1955) Novelist, screenwriter, military historian

Way

“He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love, Tear, Silence, Heart

“There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.”

Charlie Kaufman (1958) American screenwriter

Life, Death, Way

“Fine. Everybody wears seatbelts. No radio. No distractions.” Ben shot Hi a stern look. “No running commentary.” “Your loss,” Hi said. “To the pimp ride!”

Kathy Reichs book Seizure

Source: Seizure

“My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate.”

Christina Baker Kline (1964) American writer

Source: Orphan Train

Life, Fate, Feeling, Chance

“One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Personality

“For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one's own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.”

Charlie Huston Sleepless

Source: Sleepless

Question, Sleep, Time

“Take what you can have. Rejoice in what you can save, and do not mourn your losses too long.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lews Therin Telamon
(15 October 1993)

“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Source: The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

Happiness, Music, Nature, Parting

“Why is the measure of love… loss? pg.9”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Written on the Body (1992)
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Love

“I understood finally that the thing I
should have feared most was not loss, but
never loving. The price for safety was the regret
I felt at this moment. And yet I would
have to live with it for the rest of my life”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Smooth Talking Stranger

Love, Life, Fear

“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Life, Fear

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Attribution debunked in Langworth's Churchill by Himself. The earliest close match located by the Quote Investigator is from the 1953 book How to Say a Few Words by David Guy Powers. Misattributed Variant: Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Source: 1953, How to Say a Few Words by David Guy Powers, Quote p. 109, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York. Referenced by Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/28/success

Failure, Success, Motivational, Success

“So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

Love, Life

“There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Losing Season: A Memoir

Teachers

“Treat gain and loss the same.' Don't be Intimidated. Don't make a Big Deal of anything - just accept things as they come to you.”

Benjamin Hoff The Te of Piglet

Source: The Te of Piglet

“Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss”

Helen Fielding book Bridget Jones's Diary

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

“All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung.”

Megan Whalen Turner book A Conspiracy of Kings

Source: A Conspiracy of Kings

Life

“your loved ones have been used to lure you into Kronos's traps. Your fatal flaw is personal loyalty Percy. You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend you would sacrifice the world.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Love, World, Time, Personality

“If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Failure, Change

“I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.”

Robin McKinley book Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

Source: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

Pain, Way, Thinking

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

James Baldwin book Nobody Knows My Name

Source: "Faulkner and Desegregation" in Partisan Review (Fall 1956); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Context: Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.

World, Change

“It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Life, Sadness, Time

“That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

“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.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Feeling, Appearance

“It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Nature of Jade

Disappointment, Feeling, Sense, Time

“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Way

“As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Variant: As long as there is love and memory, there is no true death,” he said. He
Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Love, Memory, Hope

“There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.”

Lou Reed (1942–2013) American musician

“Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”

Og Mandino (1923–1996) American author

Time, Heartbreaking, Powerful

“But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.”

Cynthia Leitich Smith (1967) American writer and poet

Source: Tantalize

Pain, Fate, Parting, Adulthood

“Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused”

Elliot Perlman book Seven Types of Ambiguity

Source: Seven Types of Ambiguity

Pain, Hell

“A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Peace, Personality

“There's no great loss without some small gain.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie

Source: Little House on the Prairie (1935), Ch. 25; said by Ma, after Pa lost the corn crop to blackbirds but brought home some of the birds for dinner.

“Sometimes you must lose everything to gain it again, and the regaining is the sweeter for the pain of loss.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Pain

“The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seemed filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Source: The Complete Poems 1927-1979

Art

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.”

James Baldwin book Going to Meet the Man

Source: Going to Meet the Man

Love, Life, People, World

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Friday

Source: Friday

Personality

“Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.”

Dean Koontz book Odd Hours

Source: Odd Hours

Teachers

“Demons don't understand human hearts, not well. They see through a distorted glass and show you what you desire, but warped and wrong. Use that wrongness to push yourself out of the dream. Life is loss, Alexander, but it's better than this.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Life, Dreams, Understanding, Heart

“You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Victory, Forgetting

“How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.”

Stephen Fry book Making History

Source: Making History

Love, Pain

“God never said that we wouldn’t have unfair situations, that we wouldn’t experience loss. But He promised if we would stay in faith, He would restore everything that was stolen.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

God, Faith

“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

"Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Context: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

Past, Parting, Country

“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

Sense, Memory

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Love, Pain, Hurt, Hurtful

“Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.”

Neal Shusterman book Everwild

Source: Everwild

World

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

World

“Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Source: Finding Peace

Love, Pain, Peace, Justice

“The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Time

“I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”

Alyson Nöel book Evermore

Source: Evermore

Learning

“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss and Peeta (p. 388; closing words of the main text)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
So after, when he whispers, "You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real."

Life, Spring

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Clod and the Pebble, st. 3
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)
Source: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Love, Hell, Joy

“And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

World, Hope

“We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

“We can spend our days bemoaning our losses, or we can grow from them. Ultimately the choice is ours. We can be victims of circumstance or masters of our own fate, but make no mistake, we cannot be both.
The Walk - Epilogue Page 288”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Walk

Fate

“But I have learned that you make your own happiness, that part of going for what you want means losing something else. And when the stakes are high, the losses can be that much greater.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

Happiness, Learning, Parting

“And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.”

James Frey book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Fear, Change

“Listen to this, and I'll tell you 'bout the heartache
I'll tell you 'bout the heartache and the loss of God.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

"The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)" on the albums L. A. Woman (1971) and An American Prayer (1978)

God

“The loss of historical memory is restored in the very place where one has lost it.”

Sebouh Chouldjian (1959) Archbishop Sebouh Chouldjian is the primate of the Diocese of Gougark of the Armenian Apostolic Church

[Chouldjian, Bishop Sebouh, w:Sebouh Chouldjian, A bishops' pilgrimage to Western Armenia, The Armenian Reporter, 2009-12-12, http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-12-12-a-bishops--pilgrimage-to-western-armenia, 2010-06-16]
Other

Memory

“A number of students denounce state intervention and the loss of university autonomy. This student sector reflects its class background while forgetting its revolutionary obligation. This sector has not realized that it has an obligation to workers and peasants. Our workers and peasants died beside the students in order to attain power.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech to University students (1959)

Universe, Forgetting

“We take no note of time but from its loss.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Actually Night I, lines 55-56 of Young's Night Thoughts.
Misattributed

Time

“Suppose a clothing manufacturer learns of a machine that will make men’s and women's overcoats for half as much labor as previously. He installs the machines and drops half his labor force.This looks at first glance like a clear loss of employment. But the machine itself required labor to make it; so here, as one offset, are jobs that would not otherwise have existed. The manufacturer, how ever, would have adopted the machine only if it had either made better suits for half as much labor, or had made the same kind of suits at a smaller cost. If we assume the latter, we cannot assume that the amount of labor to make the machines was as great in terms of pay rolls as the amount of labor that the clothing manufacturer hopes to save in the long run by adopting the machine; otherwise there would have been no economy, and he would not have adopted it.So there is still a net loss of employment to be accounted for. But we should at least keep in mind the real possibility that even the first effect of the introduction of labor-saving machinery may be to increase employment on net balance; because it is usually only in the long run that the clothing manufacturer expects to save money by adopting the machine: it may take several years for the machine to "pay for itself."After the machine has produced economies sufficient to offset its cost, the clothing manufacturer has more profits than before. (We shall assume that he merely sells his coats for the same price as his competitors, and makes no effort to undersell them.) At this point, it may seem, labor has suffered a net loss of employment, while it is only the manufacturer, the capitalist, who has gained. But it is precisely out of these extra profits that the subsequent social gains must come. The manufacturer must use these extra profits in at least one of three ways, and possibly he will use part of them in all three: (1) he will use the extra profits to expand his operations by buying more machines to make more coats; or (2) he will invest the extra profits in some other industry; or (3) he will spend the extra profits on increasing his own consumption. Whichever of these three courses he takes, he will increase employment.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Curse of Machinery (ch. 7)

Women, Men, Money, Hope

“If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Second Jungle Book

Stanza 3.
The Second Jungle Book (1895), If— (1896)

“The ultimate guide to decision should be our estimate at the time of the nature and extent of the American interest. There may be good reasons to use our resources to resist a troublemaking power which commits aggression against a weak and friendly state if the subversion of that state would be a significant gain to the troublemaker or a significant loss to us. Even then, we should have a reasonably accurate and encouraging estimate of the chances of success before we act. We cannot afford to stake our world standing on a lost cause or on one with unduly high risks of failure.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Responsibility and Response (1967), p. 49

World, Failure, Nature, Decision

“To be perfectly ignorant in all the Terms of them is only tolerable in those, who think their Tongues of as little Use to them, as generally their Understandings are. Those whom Necessity has obliged to get their Bread by Manual Industry, where some Degree of Art is required to go along with it, and who have had some Insight into these Studies, have very often found Advantages from them sufficient to reward the Pains they were at in acquiring them. And whatever may have been imputed (how justly I'm not now to determine) to some other Studies, under the Notion of Insignificancy and Loss of Time; yet these, I believe, never caused Repentance in any, except it was for their Remissness in the Prosecution of them. And though Plato's Censure, that those who did not understand the 117 Prop. of the 10th Element, ought not to be ranked among Rational Creatures, wax unreasonable and unjust: Yet to give a Man the Character of Universal Learning that is destitute of a competent Knowledge in the Mathematics, is no less so.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Preface
A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702

Pain, Art, Mathematics, Understanding

“Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in in them, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks: for though the prizes are few and the blanks are many, the common price of a ticket is the whole fortune of a very rich man.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter VII, Part First, p. 610.

People, World, Search, Parting

“He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?
He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 22 (p. 226)

Feeling, Search, Sense, Hurt

“I was remarking that we are passing through one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world. Seven States have within the last three months thrown off an old government and formed a new. This revolution has been signally marked, up to this time, by the fact of its having been accomplished without the loss of a single drop of blood.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

World, Time

“It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 34

Personality

“Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

33.54
"Quotes", Notebooks

Books, Dreams

“And now it was your purpose to weep Vesuvius' flames in pious melody and spend your tears on the losses of your native place, what time the Father took the mountain from earth and lifted it to the stars only to plunge it down upon the hapless cities far and wide.”
Jamque et flere pio Vesuvina incendia cantu mens erat et gemitum patriis impendere damnis, cum pater exemptum terris ad sidera montem sustulit et late miseras deiecit in urbes.

Statius Silvae

iii, line 205
Silvae, Book V

Mountain, Star, Tear, Time

“In Hind there is a Malik (king) who is called Al-juzar (Gujar). Such is awdl (justice) in his kingdom, if the gold is dropped in the way, there is no danger of its being picked up and stolen away by any body. His kingdom is very vast. Arab traders go to him, he makes ahsan (favour) to them, purchases merchandise from them; the purchase and sale are carried in gold coin called tatri, When the Arabs request him to provide a body guard, he says, there is no thief in my kingdom. If there is any incident or loss to your goods, merchandise and money I stand surety. Come to me, I will pay the compensation.”

Mihira Bhoja I (836–885) Ruler of the Gurjara Pratihara dynasty

According to the Arab invaders who was Bhoja's enemy;[Kitsbul Alaq Al-Nafisa Part 4, Ibne Rustah]
About

Money, Justice, Way

“Even when heavy enemy battle losses are substantiated, one must be careful not to judge their psychological effect on the bassis of occidental values. Indeed, American military professionals who fought in the Pacific during World War II or in Korea became acutely aware of differing oriental values with respect to human life, and knew the pitfalls of putting too much store in the impact of heavy casualties on the morale of a determined foe or on the will of a ruthless totalitarian government.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 165

Life, War, World

“We now talk of our killed and wounded. There is however a very happy feeling. Those who escape regret of course the loss of comrades and friends, but their own escape and safety to some extent modifies their feelings.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (25 October 1864)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Happiness, Feeling

“My story is very boring. Mostly about hair loss.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard 2010s

“The silent annexation is ongoing. The Democratic Progressive Party’s loss of power might be tolerable, but the loss of sovereignty in our time would be an irreversible mistake that would jeopardize future generations.”

Annette Lu (1944) Taiwanese politician

Lu warns on ‘silent annexation’ by China (2013)

Time, Future

“The Palestinians living among us have, for the most part, earned a not unfounded reputation for being cheaters, because of their spirit of usury since their exile. Certainly, it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheaters; but it is just as odd to think of a nation of merchants, the great majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping the people among whom they find refuge, and even one another. The situation could not be otherwise, given a whole nation of merchants, as non-productive members of society”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

for example, the Jews in Poland page 77 of 6 December 2012 publication by Springer Science & Business Media https://books.google.ca/books?id=nRArBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA77, translation by Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) page 238 of "Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation" https://books.google.ca/books?id=4EmqLCWUFvEC&pg=PA238 in 1998, page 221 of "Acts of Religion" https://books.google.ca/books?id=c_kgAmFbvP0C&pg=PA221 in 2002, page 235 of "Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine" https://books.google.ca/books?id=CYcOfkrduWYC&pg=PA235 in 2004, page 44 of "Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism" https://books.google.ca/books?id=IYVDMuOFN20C&pg=PA44 in 2005, page 8 of "The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot" https://books.google.ca/books?id=juCYcPWdqccC&pg=PA8 in 2010, page 155 of "Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture" https://books.google.ca/books?id=YMIsYMw0ES0C&pg=PA155 in 2012, page 75 of "Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures" https://books.google.ca/books?id=4svsCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75 in 2016 and page 39 of "Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews" https://books.google.ca/books?id=6kk_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA39 in 2017 also quote this. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

People, Thinking, Parting

Quotes about loss page 3

Quotes about loss
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