A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.”
Source: The Gift
“Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.”
“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?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves - and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!”
Source: Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)
“Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?”
Source: Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)
“Alas! it is a fearful thing
To feel another's guilt!”
Source: Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde
“Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.”
Source: Essays and aphorisms
“Alas! it is true: "Be polite to bores and so shall you have bores always round about you."”
Source: ETIQUETTE
“Alas! It is well written, The road to eminence lies through the cheap and exceedingly uninviting eating-houses.”
Source: The Wallet of Kai Lung
“Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.”
Source: Baudelaire, Prose and Poetry
“Alas! Much has been done of late to promote the production of dwarfish Christians. Poor, sickly believers turn the church into an hospital, rather than an army. Oh, to have a church built up with the deep godliness of people who know the Lord in their very hearts, and will seek to follow the Lamb wherever he goes!”
“Alas! must it ever be so? Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go, And fight our own shadows forever?”
“Alas! never had I loved him so well!”
Source: The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“Alas! Our dancing days are no more. We wish, however, all those who have a relish for so agreeable and innocent an amusement all the pleasure the season will afford them.”
Source: Recollections and private memoirs of Washington by his adopted son George Washington with a memoir of the author by his daughter; and illustrative and explanatory notes by Benson J. Loosing: With illustrations
“Alas! poor human nature, pity, if hard pressed, degenerates into contempt.”
“Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.”
“Alas! that my body, clean and whole, never been corrupted, today must be consumed and burnt to ashes!”
“Alas! that the farthest and of all our thoughts should be the thought of our ends.”
“Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!”
“Alas! the joys that fortune brings
Are trifling, and decay,
And those who prize the trifling things,
More trifling still than they.”
Source: Goldsmith's miscellaneous works
“Alas! the praise given to the ear
Ne'er was nor ne'er can be sincere.”
“Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster;
There's hunger, want, and weariness, yet O we loved it so!
As on we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as, swinging heel and toe,
We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to Anywhere,
The tragic road to Anywhere, such dear, dim years ago.”
Source: Robert W. Service: Selected Poetry and Prose
“Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.”
Source: Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“Alas! the slippery nature of tender youth.”
“Alas! the small discredit of a bribe Scarce hurts the lawyer, but undoes the scribe.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope: Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, being the prologue to the satires. Satires, epistles, and odes of Horace imitated. Epitaphs. The Dunciad, in four books
“Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.”
Source: THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA (Modern Classics Series): The Magnum Opus of the World’s Most Influential Philosopher, Revolutionary Thinker and the Author of The Antichrist, The Birth of Tragedy & Beyond Good and Evil
“alas! there is no casting anchor in the stream of time!”
“Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny, and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”
“Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.”
“Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence.”
Source: Sir Gibbie
“Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.”
“Alas! to seize the moment When the heart inclines to heart, And press a suit with passion, Is not a woman's part. If man come not to gather The roses where they stand, They fade among their foliage, They cannot seek his hand.”
“Alas! we are the sport of destiny.”
Source: Miscellanies: Prose and Verse
“Alas! we give our own coloring to the actions of others.”
“Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.”
Source: On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History
“Alas! we makeA ladder of our thoughts, where angels step,But sleep ourselves at the foot: our high resolvesLook down upon our slumbering acts.”
Source: The Venetian bracelet: the lost pleiad ; a history of the lyre, and other poems
“Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.”
Source: File
“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.]”
“Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless muse; Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life.”
“Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.”
Source: Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
“Alas! When duty grows thy law, enjoyment fades away.”
Source: The Works of Frederick Schiller: Top Classic of German
“Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!”
Source: The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats
“Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!”
Source: Sartor Resartus
“Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations.”
“Alas!-but why Alas? It is the lot of mortality we experience.”
“Alas!... what is it, valiant knight, save an offering of sacrifice to a demon of vain glory, and a passing through the fire of Moloch? What remains to you as a prize of all the blood you have spilled, of all the travail and pain you have endured, of all the tears which your deeds have caused, when death hath broken the strong man's spear, and overtaken the speed of his war-horse?”
Source: Heroes of the Scottish Highlands: Ivanhoe, Waverley and Rob Roy (3 Unabridged Illustrated Classics): Historical Novels from the Author of The Pirate, The Heart of Midlothian, Old Mortality, The Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Bride of Lammermoor and Anne of Geierstein
“Alas, 'tis force alone that can compel to virtuous actions a degenerate people.”
“Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.”
Source: The fall
“Alas, alas, that ever love was sin! I ever followed natural inclination Under the power of my constellation And was unable to deny, in truth, My chamber of Venus to a likely youth.”
Source: The Canterbury tales
“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.”
“Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.”