Lost Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years — and it opens.

A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.

When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

Rabindranath Tagore

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

I see that everybody has lost their head since the infamous capitulation of Bailén. I realise that I must go there myself to get the machine working again.

Napoleon I of France

This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time. As the years passed, he fell into despair and lost all hope. For who could ever learn to love a beast? -Beauty & the Beast

Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Eagerly I wished the morrow,—vainly had I sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.

Edgar Allan Poe

A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.

What though the mast be now blown overboard, The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, And half our sailors swallow'd in the flood? Yet lives our pilot still.

William Shakespeare

All sense of dialectics is lost when someone believes that today's economy is identical to the economy 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, or that it is identical to the one in Lenin's day or to the time when Karl Marx lived. Revisionism is a thousand miles away from my mind and I truly revere Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Henry David Thoreau

Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

To the families of those we've lost; to all who called them friends; to the students of this university, the public servants gathered tonight, and the people of Tucson and Arizona: I have come here tonight as an American who, like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today, and will stand by you tomorrow.

As I look at drunkard men walking the streets of Montgomery and of other cities every day, I find myself saying, But by the grace of God, you too would be a drunkard. As I look at those who have lost balance of themselves and those who are giving their lives to a tragic life of pleasure and throwing away everything they have in riotous living, I find myself saying, But by the grace of God, I too would be here. And when you see that point, you cannot be arrogant. But you walk through life with a humility that takes away the self-centeredness that makes you a disintegrated personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can create your own style, set your own standard of beauty, embrace your own sexuality. Think about an icon we just lost — Prince. He blew up categories. People didn't know what Prince was doing. … And folks loved him for it.
You need to have the same confidence. Or as my daughters tell me all the time, You be you, Daddy. … Sometimes Sasha puts a variation on it — "You do you, Daddy." … And because you're a black person doing whatever it is that you're doing, that makes it a black thing. Feel confident.

I never think of the time I have lost. I just carry out a programme because it's there. It's mapped out for me.

It is, perhaps, worth while to note that what many people call Americanisms are really old English expressions which have lingered in our colonies while they have been lost in our own country.

It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.

Simone de Beauvoir

The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.

If you sit down crying because the sun has set, you miss the privilege of seeing the stars. Sorrow for what you have lost should not make you neglect that which comes in its place.

Rabindranath Tagore