Quotes & Sayings About Lamenting

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

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

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

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

He read his own obituary and an editorial lamenting his demise and praising his fortitude and immediately began to think up witty ways of writing to the paper to announce his continued and uninterrupted existence. The other two joined in the game with enthusiasm, and soon all three of them were howling with laughter and emptying bottles at a rate which would have alarmed even a depressed Scandinavian. — Louis De Bernieres

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

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

Lose the day loitering, 'twill be the same story
To-morrow, and the next more dilatory,
For indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute!
What you can do, or think you can, begin it!
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated;
Begin it, and the work will be completed. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

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

She smiled innocuously - at variance with her words. At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance, yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait, possibly, he thought. No emotional awareness, no feeling-sense of the actual meaning of what she said. Only the hollow, formal, intellectual definitions of the separate terms.
And, more, Rachael had begun to tease him. Imperceptibly she had passed from lamenting her condition to taunting him about his. — Philip K. Dick

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

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

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

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

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

- ... .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

One hour devoted to mourning and lamenting the
Stolen equality of the weak is nobler than a
Century filled with greed and usurpation. — Kahlil Gibran

I do think environmental writers need to be forward thinking, not just lamenting our losses. We do need to lament; in some ways it's important to be the vessels for grief for all that's being lost on our planet. But we also need to be forward thinking. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

But I also know that to ignore joy while it lasts, in favor of lamenting one's fate, is a great crime. — Nancy Farmer

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

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

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

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

A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of thar most vital of all departments, wandering alone - grieving - sometimes near audibly lamenting - for a door, for a garden! — H.G.Wells

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

Regardless, God's closet door won't seem to stay shut. Our culture is asking questions, from the latest Amazon best seller denouncing the brutality of God, to the most recent New York Times editorial lamenting the inherent violence of religion, to one of many conversations overheard at the local coffee shop on "why I could just never believe." This conversation is on our culture's lips. — Joshua Ryan Butler

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

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 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

My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I'm not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it's more a capricious and whimsical decision-making. — Adam Mansbach

She felt her in her heart all the time now, yearning for her lost love and lamenting for past mistakes. The Lady's grief was overwhelming sometimes, making Sofia sad for no reason at all, especially at night when the world around her grew quiet and there were no distractions. — Effrosyni Moschoudi

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

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

Instead of lamenting your fate, create your world. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

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

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

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

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

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

The continual whine of lamenting the burden of taxes, however successfully it may be practiced in mixed governments, is inconsistent with the sense and spirit of a republic. If taxes are necessary, they are of course advantageous, but if they require an apology, the apology itself implies an impeachment. Why, then, is man imposed upon, or why does he impose upon himself? — Thomas Paine

When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they're mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What — Steve Almond

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

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

There is a long history in country music of songs celebrating drinking and lamenting drinking. Country songs for the most part have always been heavily rooted in reality. The first artists were the people next door. They would sing on their porch or in their living room or at a barn dance. They sang about what they knew, and a lot of that was drinking. — Chet Atkins

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

Is there such a thing as a life without any regrets? I've never believed so. We spend our lives aiming for happiness and fulfilment in work, in love and with our friends and family, and yet often our energy is spent lamenting bad boyfriends, wrong career turns, fallouts with friends and opportunities missed. Or is that just me? I admit I'm naturally a glass-half-empty kind of girl, but I know regrets are a burden to happiness and I'm trying to let go of them because I've learned that it's all about choice. You can choose to turn regrets into lessons that change your future. Believe me when I say I'm really trying to do this. But the truth is, I'm failing. Because all I can think right now is: maybe I deserve it. Maybe this is my penance. — Ali Harris

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

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

Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or rather, you're sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea. — Cheryl Strayed

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

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

The people to whom your fathers told of the living God, and taught to call 'Father,' and whom the sons now seek to despoil and destroy, are crying aloud to Him in their time of trouble; and He will keep His promise, and will listen to the voices of His Hawaiian children lamenting for their homes. — Lili'uokalani

And Jabim is the Lord of broken things, who sitteth behind the house to lament the things that are cast away. And there he sitteth lamenting the broken things until the worlds be ended, or until someone cometh to mend the broken things. Or sometimes he sitteth by the river's edge to lament the forgotten things that drift upon it.
A kindly god is Jabim, whose heart is sore if anything be lost. — Lord Dunsany

On this morning his first waking moments were filled with the audible lamenting breath of having survived another winter night on the streets of St. Louis, those onerous recurring sighs that had become his respiration. — Dan Groat

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember that in all miseries lamenting becomes fools, and action, wise folk. — Philip Sidney

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

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul. — Russell Baker

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

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

The cops performed an illegal search and seizure. Brian was sobbing and lamenting about how his life was over. I honestly didn't see the big deal. It was just pot for God's sake! Clearly, I had never been to Texas. I felt bad for Brian. "Look, man," I said, "just bail me out and — Khalil Rafati

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

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

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

I looked at the headline: "The Devil Made Him Do It." It was an opinion piece about the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the "disjointed" but "grotesque" remarks he had made at a press conference. Lamenting the relative impotence of the arts in comparison to terrorism, Stockhausen had called the attacks "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos." I guess he thought of it as a Wagnerian spectacle, an opera of airplanes and towers. "Five thousand people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment," he said. "I couldn't do that. In comparison with that, we're nothing as composers. — Supervert

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

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

It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application. — Samuel Smiles

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. — Simon Schama

Jesus isn't suffering day after day for your sin. He sits triumphantly at the right hand of God and has won the final and decisive victory for you. If constant lamenting over your sin could actually help you atone for it, then it would be a noble act. However, since there is nothing to be added to your salvation and your agony contributes nothing to your salvation or sanctification, then you are free to walk through life with confidence in your forgiveness. Godly sorrow for sin does not lead to self-condemnation and attempts to atone for your sins through acts of penance. Godly sorrow leads to repentance, which leads us to the cross. There we see, once again, the beautiful sufficiency of our marvelous Savior. Godly sorrow leads us on to a big party, another glorious celebration of the truth of the gospel. — Barbara R. Duguid

You're my dream, Alaric McCabe. And I love you. I've loved you from the moment your horse dumped you at my cottage. I spent so much time being resentful and lamenting the circumstances of my life, but 'tis true that I wouldn't change a single thing because then I would have never known your love. — Maya Banks

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

...a long-term reputation is only at risk when companies engage in vocal launch activities such as PR and building hype. When a product fails to live up to those pronouncements, real long-term damage can happen to a corporate brand. But startups have the advantage of being obscure, having a pathetically small number of customers and not having much exposure. Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers. — Eric Ries

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

TALENT When I was young I had a great talent For bitching and moaning, Lamenting my errors Lost in self-pity's groaning. And now as the leaves on my branches grow dark The life force within me ignited a spark, Can do it, will do it Talent - that's all there is to it! A poem by Karen Lyons Kalmenson — David Mezzapelle

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

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

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

If you keep lamenting your misfortune, you will never be happy, since you see the world through misfortune-tinted glasses. Everything and everyone looks wrong to you. Those who live under 'normal' circumstances look far more fortunate than you are, and seemingly look down on you. These people who feel they are unfortunate reject others, unless they are regarded to have a similar fate. Some of these people are able to abandon this attitude as they realize they are not the only unfortunate people in the world. However some of them gather in groups, lament even further and thus drown more deeply into misfortune. — Hinowa Kouzuki