We're poor little lambs who've lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We're little black sheep who've gone astray, Baa-aa-aa! Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity, God ha'mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Bah!

-Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard
  'The Gentlemen-Rankers'.

So right.OK.We lost.

-Major,John
  On election night. In The Guardian, 3 May.

Now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him.

-Milton,John
  Of Satan. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.54^6.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.

-Newton,John
  Olney Hymns,'Amazing Grace'.

One more such victory, and we are lost!

-Pyrrhus of Epirus
  BC  After defeating the Romans at Asculum. Quoted in Plutarch Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata,184c.

For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name, He marksönot that you won or lostö But how you played the game.

-Rice, Grantland
Only the Brave,'Alumnus Football'.

   Was man nicht aufgibt, hat man nie verloren. What is not abandoned is never completely lost.

-Schiller, Friedrich
  Maria Stuart, act 2, sc.5.

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, emptyas paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. 722

-Scott, F(rancis) R(eginald)
  Of Canada.'Laurentian Shield'.

The woodland brook he bounding crossed, And laughed, and shouted,'Lost! lost! lost!'

-Scott, Sir Walter
  The Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto 3, stanza13.

This rortie wretched city Sair come down frae its auld hiechts öThe hauf o't smug, complacent, Lost til all pride of race or spirit, The tither wild and rouch as ever In its secret hairt But lost alsweill, the smeddum tane, The man o'independent mind has cap in hand the day öSits on its craggy spine And drees the wind and rain That nourished all its genius öWeary wi centuries This empty capital snorts like a great beast Caged in its sleep, dreaming of freedom.

-Smith, Sydney Goodsir
  Of Edinburgh.'Kynd Kittock's Land' (Kynd Kittock is a character in the poetry of the16c Scottish poetWilliam Dunbar.) rortie=splendid, smeddum=spirit, drees=endures.

You are all a lost generation.

-Stein, Gertrude
Quoted as epigraph in Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.

-Synge,John Millington
  Pegeen Mike.The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 3, closing words.

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

-Tennyson
  In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 27, l.13^16.

Prompt me,God, But not yet.When I speak Though it be you who speak Through me, something is lost. The meaning is the waiting.

-Thomas, R(onald) S(tuart)
  'Kneeling'.

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.

-Thurber,James Grover
  Fables for OurTime,'The Courtship of Arthur and Al'.

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not being vice.

-Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford
Quoted in L Kronenberger The Extraordinary MrWilkes (1973).