A Quote by Charles Dickens

Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?

Charles Dickens

Quote Topics

Better Good Good Thing Had Lost Never Thing

Quote Author

Charles Dickens
English - Novelist
February 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870

This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?

Charles Dickens

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

Raymond Chandler

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

Mark Twain

In the South, our lives kind of revolve around food and taking care of people with food. If someone was sick, or if they had had a baby, or if they had lost a loved one, or even if they lost a job, my momma was at their door with pie or a cake or something to help them feel better.

Kimberly Schlapman

I have more compassion than if I had led a life where everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed. I don't think I would be as good a person.

Elizabeth Gilbert

The one thing that saved me is that in 17 years of coaching I never had an NCAA investigator talk to one of my players. I lost games, but I lost the right way.

Lee Corso

I had all this other life happening, and 'Lost' was this sort of seasoning - but it was never the main course. It was just this thing that I would nip off and do, so to be recognized for 'Lost' all the time is amazing.

Sonya Walger

Dr. Strauss said I had something that was very good. He said I had a good motor-vation. I never ever knew I had that. I felt proud when he said that not every body with an eye-q of 68 had that thing. I don't know what it is or where I got it but he said Algernon had it too. Algernons motor-vation is the cheese they put in his box. But it can't be that because I didn't eat any cheese last week.

Daniel Keyes

For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.

Peter Abrahams

Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost- and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they?

Tom Clancy

Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.

Vladimir Nabokov

One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion.

Pete Hamill

Had I known toxic shock was real, and had I seen someone that had either lost limbs or spoke about it publicly, I would have never used tampons.

Lauren Wasser

Money lost, something lost. Honor lost, much lost. Courage lost, everything lost-better you were never born

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In the old legends, Arachne had gotten into trouble because of pride. She’d bragged about her tapestries being better than Athena’s, which had led to Mount Olympus’s first reality TV punishment program: 'So You Think You Can Weave Better Than a Goddess?' Arachne had lost in a big way.