Ifs Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left…

— James Russell Lowell

“While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Surely in a matter of this kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that we have not lived in vain,…

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to…

— Viktor E. Frankl

Nor is it wiser to weep a true occasion lost, but trim our sails, and let old bygones be.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

Every noble life becomes a revelation of the spirit which the love and joy of mankind cannot let perish from remembrance.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

I am full of the sorrow that goes with changes in surroundings, those successive stages of annihilation that slowly lead to the great and…

— Isabelle Eberhardt

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely…

— Ben Jonson

When to the Permanent is sacrificed the Mutable, the prize is thine: the drop returneth whence it came. The Open Path leads to the…

— Alexander Pope

Today it is not a matter of ‘conserving’ the present or returning to a recent past that has failed, but rather of regaining possession…

— Guillaume Faye

If one but tell a thing well, it moves on with undying voice, and over the fruitful earth and across the sea goes the…

— Pindar

“A time may come soon," said he, "when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember…

— J.R.R. Tolkien