Lamenting Quotes

You are a Chosen Man. You are Parmenion, the Death of Nations. A hundred thousand souls will you
send to the dark river, screaming and wailing, lamenting their fate. It is right and just that you
should know your choices. ~ David Gemmell

- ... .when things seem to have reached that stage, merely say "I won't play any longer", and take your departure; but if you stay, stop lamenting. ~ Epictetus

Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Men grieve [Mephistopheles] so with the days of their lamenting, [he] even hate[s] to plague them with [his] torments. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Periodically, 'The New York Times' runs a business news story lamenting how few women still make it to the top in the Wall Street boys' club. Could it be that women are choosing to be conscientious objectors in these wars of one against all? ~ Tina Brown

How did we keep getting so lost in a midnight world? Why did we continue lamenting as we wounded our hearts and were cut apart? ~ Mizuki Nomura

The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation. ~ Samuel Johnson

His own disciples were not lamenting the death of their master but rather their own loss at his passing. They were not bewailing the piteous demise of their guide in the wilderness but rather their own abandonment here in the twilight. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Without doing injustice to the living, it may safely be asserted that our loss is irreparable; and that among the shining hosts of the great and good who now cluster around the banner of the country, there exists no purer spirit, no more heroic soul, than that of the illustrious man whose death I join you in lamenting. ~ Jefferson Davis

Life wasn't for lamenting what you'd lost. It was for enjoying what you had, for however long you got to have it. While it was always terrible to lose those precious to you, it was far more terrible never to have had them at all. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

My standards were, after all, abnormally high." - the fictional ghost of Hugh Hefner, lamenting on sex in the after-life. ~ Michael Czyzniejewski

Time.

For some it was a great healer, the ultimate fixer of bad break-ups, shake-ups, and heartache…

For others, Time was an insidious stealer of all things they want most in life, stripping it away from them by sneakily changing the rules of obtaining it… For all the joyful wishes and hopeful desires held near and dear to our hearts, Time was the one element most likely to keep it from our reach.

To me, Time was all of these, and none. Time simply is. It's the framework in which we play out the games of our lives, but the secret is not to control it. It is not to master it. It is simply to learn to exist fully within the moment, to be aware of every facet of our being, and to wring every ounce of joy from it. Perhaps we were our own thieves, lamenting the absence of even a spare moment to enjoy life, when all it really takes is to stop the complaints, take the moment firmly in hand, and make it our own. Because the secret is that Time passes, and if you let it, it will leave you in its wake, aching with every beat of your heart and in every fiber of your being for what you have missed. ~ Madelyn Alt

Men have, for the most part, done with lamenting their lost faith. Sentimental tears over the happy, simple Christendom of their fathers are a thing of the past. They are proclaiming now their contempt for Christ's character, and their disgust at the very name of love. Scorn and hatred, difference and division, must be more than ever our lot, if we would be the followers of Christ in these days. Conventional religion and polite unbelief are gone forever. ~ Neville Figgis

And last, the language of cats. O, yes, cats speak gentlefriend, doubt it not - if you own more than one and can't see them at this particular moment, chances are they're off in a corner somewhere lamenting the fact that their owner seems to spend all their time reading silly books rather than paying them the attention they so richly deserve ~ Jay Kristoff

The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man - the sense of wonder. ~ Anais Nin

As our friend Zach has often noted, in our days those who do the best for astronomy are not the salaried university professors, but so-called dillettanti, physicians, jurists, and so forth.Lamenting the fragmentary time left to a professor has remaining after fulfilling his teaching duties. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss

Life is a nomadic journey. A road without trees to shelter us from the rain, without shoulders on which to rest, without lighthouses to show us the way when we are lost. I can't waste the life I've been given by standing still and lamenting the past until my days run out. I must get up and fight; I must keep providing for my family. I must keep moving forward, not just for myself, but also for my daughter and for all those who are no longer with us. Because in the end, that's why we're here, right? The only reason we are given life is to live it. ~ Miquel Reina

When she was chair of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, Daisy Goodwin wrote a controversial essay lamenting the 'unrelenting grimness' of so many novels and pointing out that 'generally great fiction contains light and shade'
not only misery but joy and humor. 'It is time for publishers to stop treating literary fiction as the novelistic equivalent of cod-liver oil: if it's nasty it must be good for you. ~ Daisy Goodwin

You can sit there forever, lamenting about how bad you've been, feeling guilty until you die, and not one tiny slice of that guilt will do anything to change a single thing in the past. Forgive yourself, then MOVE ON! ~ Wayne Dyer

A free theologian works in communication with other theologians ... He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes. ~ Karl Barth

The women in the play were really men, of course. The clock had just struck midnight and Cinderella was lamenting
'Goodness me, the clock has struck- Alackaday, and fuck my luck. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Occasionally a matrimonial epidemic appears, especially toward spring, devastating society, thinning the ranks of bachelordom, and leaving mothers lamenting for their fairest daughters. ~ Louisa May Alcott

Craftsman Ilmarinen wept
Every evening for his woman,
Weeping sleepless through the nights
And fasting through the days;
In the early hours complaining,
Every morning sighing for her,
Lamenting for his lovely lost one,
For his dear one in the grave.
For a month he swung no hammer,
Did not touch the copper handle,
and the clinking forge was silent.

Said the craftsman Ilmarinen:
"I poor fellow, do not know
How to live or how survive;
Sitting up or lying down
Nights are long and time is tedious.
I am troubled, low in spirit.

'Lonely are the nights now,lonely
And the mornings dreary, dreary.
In my sleeping I am troubled,
But the waking is the saddest.
It's not for evening that I'm lonely,
Not for morning that I'm dreary,
Not for olden times lamenting,
But I'm lonely for my loved one,
Dreary for the missing of her,
Lamenting for my dark-browed lovely.

'Often in these days it happens,
Happens in my midnight dreaming
that I stretch my hand out touching,
touching something that is nothing... ~ Elias Lönnrot

Waking love suffereth no sleepe:
Say, that raging love dothe appall the weake stomacke:
Say, that lamenting love marreth the musicall. ~ Edmund Spenser

When we lament the decline of time spent on cooking, we need to be clear what it is that we are lamenting. Many of the female cooks who devoted so many hours to preparing food in the past did so because they did not think their own time was worth much. ~ Bee Wilson

Memorable stories of every culture tell us what principles the citizenry saved their smiles for and shed their sorrowful tears lamenting. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Live life in the present. This moment is the only thing that's real. Worrying about the future and lamenting the past only crowds out the beauty of what is happening now. ~ Daniel Levin

There's nothing gained in lamenting what never was. ~ Peter V. Brett

No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn't given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I'd lost. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Still, you must especially avoid those who are gloomy and always lamenting, and who grasp at every pretext for complaint. Though a man's loyalty and kindness may not be in doubt, a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind. ~ Seneca

So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapors both away. ~ John Donne

Waste no time lamenting with regard to what is lacking. In such instances, immediately turn focus toward what is to be ... and remain poised to receive that which is due. ~ T.F. Hodge

In despair, I offer your readers their choice of the following definitions of entropy. My authorities are such books and journals as I have by me at the moment.
(a) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy of a system which cannot be converted into work by even a perfect heat engine. - Clausius.
(b) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which can be converted into work by a perfect engine. - Maxwell, following Tait.
(c) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which is not converted into work by our imperfect engines. - Swinburne.
(d) Entropy (in a volume of gas) is that which remains constant when heat neither enters nor leaves the gas. - W. Robinson.
(e) Entropy may be called the 'thermal weight', temperature being called the 'thermal height.' - Ibid.
(f) Entropy is one of the factors of heat, temperature being the other. - Engineering.
I set up these bald statement as so many Aunt Sallys, for any one to shy at.
[Lamenting a list of confused interpretations of the meaning of entropy, being hotly debated in journals at the time.] ~ Sydney Herbert Evershed

We are always looking forward to the passing and ending of winter, but when summer is here it seems as if summer must always last. As I went across the fields that day, I found myself half lamenting that the world must fade again, even that the best of her budding and bloom was only a preparation for another spring-time, for an awakening beyond the coming winter's sleep. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

You can't recapture your past anymore than you can speed up your future. Stop lamenting summer and stop trying to hurry winter. Just enjoy the fall. ~ Debbie Viguie

My thoughts hold mortal strife, I do detest my life, And with lamenting cries, Peace to my soul to bring, Oft calls that prince which here doth monarchize; But he, grim-grinning king, Who caitiffs scorns and doth the blest surprise, Late having deck'd with beauty's rose his tomb, Disdains to crop a weed, and will not come. ~ William Drummond

Since love first made the breast an instrument
Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart
Was molten to a mirror, like a rose
I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang
This mirror in your sight
Gaze you therein ~ Muhammad Iqbal

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. ~ Kathryn Schulz

Ever the man of his word, DPR wired the remaining $40,000 balance to the killer and even sent a thank-you note for the hit, lamenting in an encrypted e-mail, "I'm pissed I had to kill him . . . but what is done is done . . . I just can't believe he was so stupid . . . I just wish more people had some integrity." Yes, the founder of Silk Road, the world's largest illicit marketplace, the man who had just ordered a hit on his own employee, was disturbed by the lack of integrity in this world. ~ Marc Goodman

There are things you do sometimes, actions that you take by obeying sudden impulses, without stopping for even a fraction of a second to think, and then you spend the rest of your life either lamenting it or thanking yourself for it. They are rare, unique, and perfect moments. ~ Irene Gonzalez Frei

Each indecision brings its own delays and days are lost lamenting over lost days. Whatever you can do or think you can do, begin it. For boldness has magic, power, and genius in it. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Let's shift from moralizing about and lamenting divorce to understanding that a successful marriage, no matter the length, is one that contributes to knowing ourselves better and evolving into more loving and compassionate people. ~ Deb Purdy

My Republican friends are lamenting reconciliation. But I would recommend for them to go back and look at history. ~ Harry Reid

One poor chap, who had no other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the remembrance: 'Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once.' But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that, and so that cheapened the distinction too much." ~From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Scene where the neighbor boys were lamenting over Tom's apparent drowning. ~ Mark Twain

Most of my own power has come from excellence, not advocacy. My approach is to say to myself, 'Just do better. Be better.' That's not to say there's no bias, no sexism. There is, and it's not good. It's just that for me, the solution of doing better is far more empowering than lamenting one's circumstances. ~ Megyn Kelly

In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses this speaker loves. Here they are witnesses, companions to the spirit, and as vulnerably mortal as human beings. Socially and politically alert, lamenting and celebrating, Barrington's passionate poems inscribe the broad range of her affections. ~ Mark Doty

And then, instead of lamenting past calamities we might all cheerfully set to work to remedy them; and the greater the difficulties, the harder our present privations, the greater should be our cheerfulness to endure the latter, and our vigour to contend against the former. ~ Emily Bronte

I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment? ~ Epictetus

I'm saying maybe you should stop putting so much energy into lamenting the fact that [redacted] was wrong about you, and start putting your energy into proving her right, instead. ~ Marissa Meyer

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. ~ Peter Heller

If you are lying in bed now lamenting life, remember this: If I hadn't been harassed at work by people who lacked professionalism, given bad news by a doctor that saved my life, gone nearly broke, lost girlfriends for stupid reasons, had terrible bosses, made mistakes, and been lonely I never would have started my company or be grateful for every moment in the present. I used all of the above as fuel for my fire. Go to bed tonight knowing that its the tough times that prepare us for the best times. And the tough times teach us to stay up later, get up earlier, and surround ourselves with awesome people! ~ Robert J. Braathe

If editors truly want to improve their byline ratio, they need to stop lamenting the fact that few women journalists send them cold pitches and start taking a hard look at their stable of regular contributors. How many women are on the masthead? How many women columnists or bloggers are on the payroll? This is how real change is going to happen. ~ Ann Friedman

I remember the words of Bill Tall Bull, a Cheyenne elder. As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. "They love to hear the old language," he said, "it's true." "But," he said, with fingers on his lips, "You don't have to speak it here." "If you speak it here," he said, patting his chest, "They will hear you. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

What those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous of years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or |what was equally sinful| giving way individualistically to inner sorrows. ~ Milan Kundera

PLUNDER, v. To take the property of another without observing the decent and customary reticences of theft. To wrest the wealth of A from B and leave C lamenting a vanishing opportunity. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Our lamenting of God's "silence" while our Bible goes undisturbed is actually quite revealing, because we want new revelation while at the same time we refuse to be obedient to what we already know. ~ Matt Chandler

The one so loved that a single lyre
raised more lament than lamenting women ever did;
and that from the lament a world arose in which
everything was there again: woods and valley
and path and village, field and river and animal;
and around this lament-world, just as
around the other earth, a sun
and a starry silent heaven turned,
a lament-heaven of disordered stars -- :
This one so loved. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again, I've undergone the humbling experience of first
lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the
crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn't have been a Nash
equilibrium. ~ Scott Aaronson

By that tomb grows Gibran's sorrow together with the cypress trees, and above the tomb his spirit flickers every night commemorating Selma, joining the branches of the trees in sorrowful wailing, mourning and lamenting the going of Selma, who, yesterday was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and today is a silent secret in the bosom of the earth.
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Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow. Solitude is the ally of sorrow as well as a companion of spiritual exaltation.
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He lives spiritually in the past because the present passes swiftly, and the future seems to him an approach to the oblivion of the grave.
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Now I know that there is something higher than heaven and deeper than the ocean and stranger than life and death and time. I know now what I did not know before.
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When I walked in the fields, I saw the token of Eternity in the awakening of nature, and when I sat by the seashore I heard the waves singing the song of Eternity.
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We were three people, gathered and crushed by the hands of destiny; and all of us were toys in the hands of fate.
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Be happy because I shall live in you after my death.
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This is the only friend I shall have after you are gone, but how can he console me when he is suffering also? How can a broken heart find consolation in a disappointed soul? A sorrowful woman cannot be comforted by her neighbour's sorrow, nor can ~ Kahlil Gibran

He does not know what caused him to break off from Weston and walk out. Perhaps it was when the boy said 'forty-five or fifty'. As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innocence. It touched him, perhaps, the simplicity of it. Or perhaps he just needed air. Let us say you are in a chamber, the windows sealed, you are conscious of the proximity of other bodies, of the declining light. In the room you put cases, you play games, you move your personnel around each other: notional bodies, hard as ivory, black as ebony, pushed on their paths across the squares. Then you say, I can't endure this any more, I must breathe: you burst out of the room amd into a wild garden where the guilty are hanging from trees, no longer ivory, no longer ebony, but flesh; and their wild lamenting tongues proclaim their guilt as they die. In this matter, cause has preceded effect. What you dreamed has enacted itself. You reach for a blade but the blood is already shed. The lambs have butchered and eaten themselves. They have brought knives to the table, carved themselves, and picked their own bones clean. ~ Hilary Mantel

we are to 'hunger and thirst for righteousness'. For what is the use of confessing and lamenting our sin, of acknowledging the truth about ourselves to both God and men, if we leave it there? Confession of sin must lead to hunger for righteousness. ~ John R.W. Stott

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime. ~ Tom Shales

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, "When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you." Shaw lamented natural selection's "hideous fatalism," and complained of its "damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration."4 ~ Christopher Ryan

No use lamenting over it! I was now living in a blaze of unsatisfied desire, of suspenseful expectancy, that often made me wild and crazy. I often saw the image of my dream beloved before me with more than lifelike clarity, much more clearly than my own hand; I spoke to it, wept before it, cursed it. I called it mother and knelt before it in tears; I called it beloved and sensed its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss; I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderess. It lured me into the tenderest dreams of love and into acts of dissolute shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too bad and vile. ~ Hermann Hesse

Oh, a wan cloud was drawn o'er the dim weeping dawn

As to Josie's side I returned at last,

And the heart in my breast for the girl I lov'd best

Was beating, ah, beating, how loud and fast!

While the doubts and the fears of the long aching years

Seem'd mingling their voices with the moaning flood:

Till full in my path, like a wild water wraith,

My true love's shadow lamenting stood.

But the sudden sun kiss'd the cold, cruel mist

Into dancing show'rs of diamond dew,

And the dark flowing stream laugh'd back to his beam,

And the lark soared aloft in the blue:

While no phantom of night but a form of delight

Ran with arms outspread to her darling boy,

And the girl I love best on my wild throbbing breast

Hid her thousand treasures with cry of joy. ~ Amy Harmon

I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one. ~ Mel Brooks

Whether it's watching a sunset, or really feeling the stream of water hit your face in the shower, everyone needs to take time to find a way to quiet themselves.
Allowing these moments of awareness and recognizing that it is a magnificent thing to be alive, regardless of what might be pressing on me, has brought a level of calm that words can't adequately explain.
Many of the spiritual teachers who have talked with me on Super Soul Sunday describe the highest state of mindfulness as a "constant state of prayer." This means acknowledging only what you are experiencing in that moment. The true power of staying in the now means that you resist projecting what might happen in the future or lamenting past mistakes. There will always be times of stress or sadness, but when you feel the earth moving, that's the time to bring yourself back to center. Whatever shakeup or disturbance that might come, you'll handle that when it actually happens. But in this moment, you're still breathing. In this moment, you've survived. In this moment, you're finding a way to step onto higher ground.
Today and every day, I continue to do the consciousness work, focusing on prayer and just being still. I awaken, and my first thought is, Thank you, and my next thought is, I'm still here in this body. I feel the All that is God so deeply that it lifts and carries me. Sometimes I actually feel weightless in the love that I call God, because I sense it in all things.
The entry point for ~ Oprah Winfrey

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me. ~ Anne Carson

Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man." This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world's leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent. ~ Algis Valiunas

It's a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best if everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days. ~ Neil Gaiman

American leaders clamored for this policy because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its "glut" of overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While wealthy Americans were lamenting it, huge numbers of ordinary people were living in conditions of severe deprivation. The surplus production from farms and factories could have been used to lift millions out of poverty, but this would have required a form of wealth redistribution that was repugnant to powerful Americans. Instead they looked abroad. ~ Stephen Kinzer

Lamenting the past is a waste of energy that we can turn into positive energy through work and acquiring skills. ~ Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve. ~ Dylan Thomas

RICH I'm lamenting. I've lost my innocence.
CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you've only just noticed, it can't have been very important to you. ~ Robert Bolt