Alas Quotes - page 12
I attacked the English of the Northern Shires like a lion. I ordered their houses and corn, with all their belongings, to be burnt without exception and large herds of cattle and beasts of burden to be destroyed wherever they were found. It was there I took revenge on masses of people by subjecting them to a cruel famine; and by doing so - alas!
William I of England
Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.
Czesław Miłosz
Immoral, licentious, anarchical, unscientific - call them by what names you will - yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland - a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live was then in itself a delight, because living implied seeing.
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Alas, how strong a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes - we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices, as one of your Spaceland poets has said -.
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Why, alas! is life decreed
Full of pain and full of sorrow?
All uncertain as it is,
Can we rest upon to-morrow?
Why should blessings yet in store,
Hold us still in expectation?
Leading thro' succeeding sorrows,
By some fond anticipation:
'Tis to give a tender interest
To the scenes in which we're moving:
While those hopes so often blasted,
Sensual pleasures are reproving.
Elizabeth Bath
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, Tom, are but shadows and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.
Charles Dickens
In this way they went on, and on, and on--in the language of the story-books--until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground.
Charles Dickens
The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.
Alas! the wings that lift the mind no aid
Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I felt a real Christian satisfaction in the fact that, if there were no other, there was one man who (several years before existence set the race another lesson to learn) made a practical effort on a small scale to learn the lesson of loving one's neighbor and alas! Got at the same time a frightful insight into what an illusion Christendom is, and (a little later, to be sure) an insight also into what a situation the simpler classes suffered themselves to be seduced by paltry-newspaper writers, whose struggle or fight for equality (since it is in the service of a lie) cannot lead to any other result but to prompt the privileged classes in self-defence to stand proudly aloof from the common man, and to make the common man insolent in his forwardness.
Søren Kierkegaard
