A Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Elizabeth Bowen

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Brief Forlorn Forlorn Hope Hope Impossible Lovers Pity Selfishness

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Elizabeth Bowen
Irish - Novelist
June 7, 1899 - February 22, 1973

If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt.

Jonathan Edwards

Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Pity is for this life, pity is the worm inside the meat, pity is the meat, pity is the shaking pencil, pity is the shaking voice-- not enough money, not enough love--pity for all of us--it is our grace, walking down the ramp or on the moving sidewalk, sitting in a chair, reading the paper, pity, turning a leaf to the light, arranging a thorn.

Jane Austen

Apoplexie and lethargie, As forlorn hope, assault the enemy.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.

Graham Swift

I do not hope somebody breaks in. However, if they did, I pity them. I pity the fool that breaks into my house.

Amber Heard

In one degree or another we all struggle with selfishness. Since it is so common, why worry about selfishness anyway? Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion.

Neal A. Maxwell

What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!' Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.

J. R. R. Tolkien

To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it.

Michel Houellebecq

They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

Gregory Maguire

"Duty, Honor, Country" - those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Douglas MacArthur

Without a doubt, one of the things which keeps us from attaining perfection is our tongue. When one has reached the point of no longer committing faults in speech, he has surely reached perfection, as was said by the Holy Spirit. The worst defect in talking is talking too much. Hence, in speech be brief and virtuous, brief and gentle, brief and simple, brief and charitable, brief and amiable.

Saint Francis de Sales

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.

Juliet Marillier

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Plato

If pity was always equally alive and acting in all individuals and in all circumstances, we could do away with moral. Unfortunately, it is not compassion, but rather it's contrary, selfishness, that act most strongly in us.

African Spir

We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

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