Top 100 Quotes About Alas
#1. I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.
Julian Barnes
#2. We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.
George Eliot
#3. I was wondering, since I have kissed you three times now, if you might turn into a handsome prince." At the sight of his quick, easy grin, I feel my heart dance in my chest.
"Alas, you are still stuck with a toad, my lady.
Robin LaFevers
#4. It does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified!
Camille Pissarro
#5. Nay!' said Legolas. 'Alas for us all! And for all that walk 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
J.R.R. Tolkien
#6. Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before.
William Wycherley
#8. Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever
Max Tegmark
#9. 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
#10. The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. -I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning.
William Wordsworth
#11. It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them.
Gustave Flaubert
#12. (The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.)
Matt Haig
#13. Then will the poor worldling exclaim: "Alas! my house, my gardens, that elegant furniture, those garments, will soon be no longer mine: the grave alone remaineth for me.
Alfonso Maria De Liguori
#14. Alas! Alas! Life is full of disappointments; as one reaches one ridge there is always another and a higher one beyond which blocks the view.
Fridtjof Nansen
#16. And just look at these men: their eye saith it - they know nothing better on earth than to be with a woman.
Filth is at the bottom of their souls; and alas! If their filth hath spirit in it!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#17. Alas, this mundane realm is never as fun as the one inside our minds. But we can endeavor to make it so.
Larry Atchley Jr.
#18. If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.
Louise Erdrich
#19. Alas, how wretched is the being who depends on the stability of public favour!
Sarah Siddons
#21. I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the Gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folk pay for their dirty work.' 'I would,' she said. 'That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We
J.R.R. Tolkien
#22. Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.
Sophocles
#23. O World, try to deceive someone else. Are you trying to tempt me or attract me? No way! I divorce you irrevocably. Your time is short and you are insignificant. Alas! The provision is little, the journey is long and the way is lonely.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#24. She dreamed of escape - of growing wings like a bird and flying away from the palace, never to return. But, alas, she was a bird still locked tightly in her cage.
Morgan Rhodes
#25. Alas! How difficult it is to prevent the countenance from betraying guilt!
Ovid
#26. Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
Matthew Arnold
#28. It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty.
Albert Einstein
#29. 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
#30. No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate).
Frederic Bastiat
#31. Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#32. Alas, the spheres of truth are less transparent than those of
illusion.
L. E. J. Brouwer
#33. I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Sydney Smith
#35. Alas, all too often, the dream turns into a mud puddle. I am left looking at a disaster. What to do! Keep working. I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me ...
Jules Olitski
#36. We still, alas, cannot forestall it-
This dreadful ailment's heavy toll;
The spleen is what the English call it,
We call it simply, Russian soul.
Alexander Pushkin
#37. What's optimism? said Cacambo.
Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.
Voltaire
#38. The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play.
David Rakoff
#39. I recognise your body in liana; your expression in the eyes of a frightened gazelle; the beauty of your face in that of the moon, your tresses in the plumage of peacocks... alas! Timid friend- no one object compares to you.
Kalidasa
#40. My soul, alas, needs these uneasinesses in outward things, to be driven to take refuge in God.
Henry Martyn
#41. I am very curvy, so the vintage stores suit me better than most designers. I just can't seem to give up crisps, or make my boobs shrink for that matter. Alas, I will never fit a size zero.
Marina And The Diamonds
#42. When he overheard the boys whispering that he was a queer, he said he regarded that as a compliment since so many of the world's great men had been homosexual. Alas, I've been sentenced to a life mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope that a few of you will be more fortunate.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#43. And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#44. When things ain't going right, something is missing, which you only need to fill up.
Think about that. Alas !!
Bharat Budhani
#46. I have precognitive dreams such as the year my brother's apartment caught fire and he lost everything. I'd dreamt it two months before. Alas, though I warned him, it still happened. Thankfully no one was harmed. I also read Tarot cards, mostly for fun.
Franny Armstrong
#47. Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.
Hermann Hesse
#48. There are probably a dozen perfect happy endings you could write. And a thousand bittersweet ones, and at least a million that are gloriously tragic. Alas, you only get to pick one.
Scott Westerfeld
#49. It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
John Brown
#50. But time brought healing,
Downsizing of ego,
And freedom from bondage.
Alas, neither damnation
Nor salvation
Would come -
No terror of some hellish fiend
Or apocalyptic fury
Upon his command.
There was nothing to fear,
And there was everything.
Kyrian Lyndon
#51. 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
#52. We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
#53. Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?
Matthew Arnold
#54. Were I to be angry at men being fools, I could here find ample room for declamation; but, alas! I have been a fool myself; and why should I be angry with them for being something so natural to every child of humanity?
Oliver Goldsmith
#56. It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words.
Georges Bernanos
#57. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.
Paul Kalanithi
#58. 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
#59. Alas, raising a young lady is a mystery even beyond an enchanter's skill.
Lloyd Alexander
#60. The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.
Robert Baldwin Ross
#62. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress-trees Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across the mournful marbles play!
John Greenleaf Whittier
#63. Alas, woman is faithful as long as she loves, but you demand that she be faithful without love and give herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel then, woman or man?
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#64. I decided to "find myself" in monumental sculpture. Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture!
Sergei Dovlatov
#66. Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.
George Eliot
#67. Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life ... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.
Charles Dickens
#68. You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!
Charles Lamb
#69. He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to yours hands.
No, It passes through them, alas.
Hilary Mantel
#71. Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on.
Thomas Mallon
#72. Alas for a love whose fire is extinct,
A love that was born in the Holy Place and died in the house of idols!
Muhammad Iqbal
#73. This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer's energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
John Ashbery
#74. Property is unstable, and youth perishes in a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning fangs of Death, Yet men delay to obtain release from the world. Alas, the conduct of mankind is surprising.
Plautus
#75. Alas for those girls who've refused the truth: The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.
Jack D. Zipes
#76. I shall be glad to see thee back, daughter, for I miss thee dreadfully. I wish I did not! I was taking a nap in my chair today, and I thought I heard thee rustling thy papers, and I looked over at thy table expecting to see thee, and alas! thee was not there, and it was dreadful.
Hannah Whitall Smith
#77. Alas, by what rude fate Our lives, like ships at sea, an instant meet, Then part forever on their courses fleet.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#78. The crew of Apollo 8, who at Christmas, 1968, became the first men ever to set eyes upon the Lunar Farside, told me that they had been tempted to radio back the discovery of a large black monolith: alas, discretion prevailed.
Arthur C. Clarke
#79. Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.
Nancy Mairs
#80. Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too long And there follows a mist and a weeping rain And life is never the same again
George MacDonald
#81. Death is not rare, alas! nor burials few,
And soon the grassy coverlet of God
Spreads equal green above their ashes pale.
Bayard Taylor
#82. The moon has set In a bank of jet That fringes the Western sky, The pleiads seven Have sunk from heaven And the midnight hurries by; My hopes are flown And, alas! alone On my weary couch I lie.
Sappho
#83. Alas! how many souls there are full of self, and yet desirous of doing good and serving God, but in such a way as to suit themselves; who desire to impose rules upon God as to His manner of drawing them to Himself. They want to serve and possess Him, but they are not willing to be possessed by Him.
Francois Fenelon
#85. Alas! dear Joy, the merriest, is dead. But I have wed Peace ; and our babe, a boy, New-born, is Joy.
John B. Tabb
#87. Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.
Honore De Balzac
#88. Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.
Karen Armstrong
#89. It's a joy to be up close to Derek Jacobi's work. Alas, we haven't worked very much, over the years, since we were at university together, but I don't think I've missed many of his great shows and performances.
Ian McKellen
#90. Alas, 'tis force alone that can compel to virtuous actions a degenerate people.
Vittorio Alfieri
#91. Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting.
Joyce Appleby
#92. Alas! if the principles of contentment are not within us, the height of station and worldly grandeur will as soon add a cubit to a man's stature as to his happiness.
Laurence Sterne
#93. Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.
Mason Cooley
#94. Juno: "The heroes of olympus must unite! After your victory over kronos in manhattan ... well I fear that wounded jupiter's self-esteem."
Percy: Cause I was right and he was wrong"
Juno: "He should be used to that after being married to me so long, but alas.
Rick Riordan
#95. He used the haunting phrase, Alas for what has been lost.
Mitch Albom
#96. Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.
Jean Cocteau
#97. 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
#98. Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
Voltaire
#99. Alas! the joys that fortune brings
Are trifling, and decay,
And those who prize the trifling things,
More trifling still than they.
Oliver Goldsmith
#100. There was a bond, you see, when we were both young, but she wanted to be the best of all witches and I hoped one day to be Archchancellor. Alas for us, our dreams came true.
Terry Pratchett
