Woe Quotes - Page 10

• But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.

  Herman Melville

  Hands, Delight, Higher

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.50

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• The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns;
  The low'ring eye, the petulance, the frown,
  And sullen sadness, that o'ershade, distort,
  And mar the face of beauty, when no cause
  For such immeasurable woe appears;
  These Flora banishes, and gives the fair
  Sweet smiles, and bloom less transient than her own.

  William Cowper

  Sweet, Sadness, Eye

  William Cowper, James Sambrook (2016). “William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems”, p.72, Routledge

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• There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

  John Carroll

  Responsibility, Evil, Misery

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.64, Taylor & Francis

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• Woe unto thee if after all thy profession thou shouldst be found under the power of ignorance, lost in formality, drowned in earthly-mindedness, envenomed with malice, exalted in an opinion of thine own righteousness, leavened with hypocrisy and carnal ends in God's service.

  Joseph Alleine

  Ignorance, Woe Unto, Hypocrisy

  Joseph Alleine (1824). “An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners”, p.170

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• I speak of the war as fruitless; for it is clear that, prosecuted upon the basis of the proclamations of September 22d and September 24th, 1862, prosecuted, as I must understand these proclamations, to say nothing of the kindred blood which has followed, upon the theory of emancipation, devastation, subjugation, it cannot fail to be fruitless in every thing except the harvest of woe which it is ripening for what was once the peerless republic.

  Franklin Pierce

  War, Blood, Devastation

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• All perfect things are saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, The matchless tinting on the royal rose Whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked. Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked Soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows, These hold a deeper pathos than our woes, Since they leave nothing better to expect.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Autumn, Clothes, Perfection

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.658, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Who looks at me, beholdeth sorrows all, All pain, all torture, woe and all distress; I have no need on other harms to call, As anguish, languor, cruel bitterness, Discomfort, dread, and madness more and less; Methinks from heaven above the tears must rain In pity for my harsh and cruel pain.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Pain, Rain, Heaven

  Geoffrey Chaucer (2012). “Troilus and Cressida”, p.173, Courier Corporation

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• Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Snow, Midnight, Wrecks

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1859). “Poems. New, complete ed”, p.95

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• When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

  John Dewey

  Medicine, Humanity, Inquiry

  1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy.

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• If, by chance, someone among those men of extraordinary talent is found who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his age and to debase himself with childish works, woe unto him! He will die in poverty and oblivion.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Men, Woe Unto, Yield

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• In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: "Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.

  James Branch Cabell

  Sports, Men, Sea

  James Branch Cabell (2013). “The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection”, p.5, eBookIt.com

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• The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Meaningful, Past, Reality

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• Apathy is the great requisite for the station; for woe betide the wretch who fancies any modicum of zeal.

  James F. Cooper

  Apathy, Fancy, Zeal

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• The purely material world seems to have more in common than we with the unchanging and everlasting years of the Great Creator. Yet we know that it is not so. In reality the rocks are less enduring than man. Each man's personal self will still survive for weal or woe, when another catastrophe shall have utterly changed the surface of this planet, and the elements shall have melted with fervent heat, and the earth also and all things that are therein shall have been burnt up.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Reality, Men, Rocks

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• Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!

  Theodore Roosevelt

  War, Fighting, Men

  Theodore Roosevelt (2006). “History as Literature and Other Essays”, p.131, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Just are the ways of heaven; from Heaven proceed
  The woes of man: Heaven doom'd the Greeks to bleed.

  Homer

  Men, Heaven, Greek

  Homer (1805). “The Odyssey of Homer. Translated from the Greek by Alexander Pope, etc”, p.165

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• The long historian of my country's woes.

  Homer

  Country, Long, History

  Homer (1872). “The Iliad ...”, p.331

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• Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.

  Homer

  Evil, Looks, Facts

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• So many miseries have craz'd my voice,
  That my woe-wearied tongue is still and mute.

  William Shakespeare

  Voice, Tongue, Misery

  William Shakespeare (2013). “Histories of Shakespeare in Plain and Simple English (a Modern Translation and the Original Version)”, p.518, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Woe to those who despise devotion to Mary! ... The soul cannot live without having recourse to Mary and recommending itself to her. He falls and is lost who does not have recourse to Mary.

  Alphonsus Liguori

  Christian, Fall, Soul

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• The sin and the shame and the sorrow, The crime and the want and the woe That are born there in your workshop, No hand can paint, you know.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Anger, Hands, Sorrow

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.250, Jazzybee Verlag

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• When, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.

  Jack London

  Stars, Dark, Night

  Jack London (1992). “The Call of the Wild and White Fang”, p.17, Wordsworth Editions

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• He scorn'd his own, who felt another's woe.

  Thomas Campbell

  Gratitude, Philanthropy, Scorn

  Thomas Campbell (1822). “Poetical Works”, p.95

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• Affliction is the good man's shining scene; prosperity conceals his brightest ray; as night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.

  Edward Young

  Stars, Night, Men

  Edward Young (1839). “Night thoughts on life, death, and immortality. [Followed by] A paraphrase on part of the book of Job”, p.206

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• Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator.

  David Mitchell

  Love, Grief, Men

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