Loss / Losing - Quotes

A little loss frightens, a great one tames. - Spanish Proverb

A loss you know not is no loss. - John de Barros

A man seems never to know what anything means till he has lost it; and this I suppose is the reason why losses – vanishing away of things – are among the teachings of this world of shadows. - Orville Dewey

A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself. - Michel de Montaigne

All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. - William S. Burroughs

Always have the situation under control, even if losing. Never betray an inward sense of defeat. - Arthur Ashe

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. - George Eliot

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever ... finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them. - Paul Coelho

As there is no worldly gain without some loss, so there is no worldly loss without some gain; if thou hast lost thy wealth, thou hast lost some trouble with it; if thou art degraded from thy honor, thou art likewise freed from the stroke of envy; if sickness hath blurred thy beauty, it hath delivered thee from pride. Set the allowance against the loss, and thou shalt find no loss great; he loses little or nothing, that reserves himself. - Francis Quarles

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. - Rumi

Even loss can be a profit. - Persian Proverb

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. - Haruki Murakami

Except in a very few matches, usually with world-class performers, there is a point in every match (and in some cases it's right at the beginning) when the loser decides he's going to lose. And after that, everything he does will be aimed at providing an explanation of why he will have lost. He may throw himself at the ball (so he will be able to say he's done his best against a superior opponent). He may dispute calls (so he will be able to say he's been robbed). He may swear at himself and throw his racket (so he can say it was apparent all along he wasn't in top form). His energies go not into winning but into producing an explanation, an excuse, a justification for losing. - C. Terry Warner

For every winner, there's a loser. And that person didn't really need to lose. They just didn't understand the game plan. - Buzz Aldrin

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language. - Mark Slouka

He who does not gain loses. - French Proverb

He who has lost his oxen is always hearing bells. - Spanish Proverb

He who recovers but the tail of his cow does not lose all. - French Proverb

I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone – you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence. - Alyson Noel

I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life. - Muhammad Ali

I would prefer even to lose with honour than to win by cheating. - Sophocles

I would rather lose in a cause that will someday win, than win in a cause that will someday lose! - Woodrow Wilson

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term. - David Mitchell

If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won't just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms. - Elizabeth Lesser

If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it. - Lemony Snicket

If you learn from a loss you have not lost. - Austin O’Malley

It is better to lose than lose more. - Spanish Proverb

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. - Mark Twain

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. - Chuck Palahniuk

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. - Elizabeth Bishop

Losing ... really does say something about who you are. Among other things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyse your failure, or just complain about bad luck? If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are. - Lance Armstrong

Losing is only temporary and not all encompassing. You must simply study it, learn from it, and try hard not to lose the same way again. Then you must have the self-control to forget about it. - John Wooden

Losing would be painful, but not as painful as knowing there was something else you could've done. - Joe Trippi

Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin. - Brian Ruckley

Loss and possession, death and life are one, there falls no shadow where there shines no sun. - Hilaire Belloc

Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. - Pat Conroy

Loss is the hardest thing ... but it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore. - Dean Koontz

Many things are lost for want of asking. - English Proverb

No man can lose what he never had. - Izaak Walton

Nobody remembers who finished second but the guy who finished second. - Bobby Unser

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size. - Mark Twain

One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it. - William Hazlitt

One man's loss is another man's gain. - English Proverb

Only loss teaches us about the value of things. - Arthur Schopenhauer

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us – that's snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness. - Haruki Murakami

Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life. - Caitlin Kittredge

Sometimes, you lose. Nothing you can do but admit it. - Sarah Dessen

Sometimes, you must lose everything to gain it again, and the regaining is the sweeter for the pain of loss. - Cassandra Clare

That loss is most discreditable which is caused by negligence. - Seneca

That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning. - Richard Bach

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. - Elizabeth Bishop

The fear of losing is the flip side of the need to win. Because evolution doesn't favour losers, the fear of losing is so programmed into our DNA that we do all sorts of things, both rational and irrational, to avoid losing. We don't let people cut into line, we compete in meaningless games and sports as if our lives were at stake, and we will never buy from or agree with someone who makes us feel as if he's about to win and we're about to lose. - Gene Bedell

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all. - Publilius Syrus

The victor shall soon be the vanquished, if he relax his exertion; and ... the vanquished this year, may be the victor in the next, in spite of all competition. - Abraham Lincoln

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking. - James Patterson

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other. - Jose Ortega Y Gasset

'Tis better to have loved and loss than never to have loved at all. - Alfred Tennyson

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. - Cassandra Clare

We gain and lose by the same means. - Roman Proverb

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety – and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. - Judith Viorst

We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one. - Dean Koontz

We never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. - Gail Cladwell

What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. - Suzanne Collins

What makes defeat so painful is just the awareness that the other has won. It hurts to lose because it feels so good to win. - David Roochnik

Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here's what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it's still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it's been too long since you missed them last. - Kristin O’Donnell

Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it. - Dianne Feinstein

Wise men ne'er sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms. - William Shakespeare

You can't blame your opponents for applying a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity. - Bill Clinton

You know what makes a good loser? Practice. - Ernest Hemingway

You’re never a loser until you quit trying. - Mike Ditka