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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Forgetfulness

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Pope.

Men are men; the best sometimes forget.

Shakespeare.

It is sure the hardest science to forget!

Pope.

Oh, if, in being forgotten, we could only forget.

Lew Wallace.

Forget thyself to marble.

Milton.

And when he is out of sight, quickly also is he out of mind.

Thomas à Kempis.

Quit the world, and the world forgets you.

Beaconsfield.

It is far off; and rather like a dream than an assurance that my remembrance warrants.

Shakespeare.

There is nothing new except what is forgotten.

Mlle. Bertin.

The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

Fuller.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

Cervantes.

Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls his watery labyrinth, which whoso drinks forgets both joy and grief.

Milton.

  • We bury love,
  • Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;
  • That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
  • Alexander Smith.

    It is sometimes expedient to forget what you know.

    Syrus.

  • When I forget that the stars shine in air—
  • When I forget that beauty is in stars—
  • When I forget that love with beauty is—
  • Will I forget thee: till then all things else.
  • Bailey.

  • Fill with Forgetfulness, fill high! yet stay—
  • —’Tis from the past we shadow forth the land
  • Where smiles, long lost, again shall light our way,
  • —Though the past haunt me as a spirit—yet I ask not to forget!
  • Mrs. Hemans.

  • If e’er I win a parting token,
  • ’Tis something that has lost its power—
  • A chain that has been used and broken,
  • A ruin’d glove, a faded flower;
  • Something that makes my pleasure less,
  • Something that means—forgetfulness.
  • Willis.

    Some men treat the God of their fathers as they treat their father’s friend. They do not deny Him; by no means; they only deny themselves to Him, when He is good enough to call upon them.

    J. C. and A. W. Hare.

  • Go, forget me—why should sorrow
  • O’er that brow a shadow fling?
  • Go, forget me—and to-morrow
  • Brightly smile and sweetly sing.
  • Smile—though I shall not be near thee;
  • Sing—though I shall never hear thee.
  • Charles Wolfe.

  • Forgotten? No, we never do forget;
  • We let the years go; wash them clean with tears,
  • Leave them to bleach out in the open day,
  • Or lock them careful by, like dead friends’ clothes,
  • Till we shall dare unfold them without pain—
  • But we forget not, never can forget.
  • D. M. Mulock.

    There is nothing—no, nothing—innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.

    Dickens.