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# Weekend Words: Alas
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-alas/
- Published: 2016-10-23T13:30:15.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:28:35.000Z
- Description: "Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Art, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/10/alas.jpg)

Eugène Delacroix, “Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard” (1839), oil on canvas, 29,5 x 36 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (image via Web Gallery of Art)

Three debates down and two weeks still to go.

> Alas my love you do me wrong,  
> To cast me of discourteously;  
> And I have loved you so long,  
> Delighting in your company.  
>  
> **—Anonymous, “Greensleeves”**

> Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.  
>  
> **—Robert Heilbroner**

> Alas, I am dying beyond my means.  
>  
> **—Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed**

> Hugo — alas!  
>  
> **—André Gide, when asked who was the greatest 19th-century poet**

> In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden.  
>  
> **—Aubrey Beardsley**

> At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s  
> We drank our liquor straight,  
> Some went upstairs with Margery,  
> And some, alas, with Kate.  
>  
> **—W. H. Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”**

> Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!  
>  
> **—D. H. Lawrence**

> Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.  
>  
> **—Vincent van Gogh**

> Pigeons on the grass alas.  
>  
> **—Gertrude Stein, *Four Saints in Three Acts***

> I’ve studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine — and even, alas! Theology — from end to end with labor keen; and here, poor fool with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before.  
>  
> **—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe**

> Alas! All music jars when the soul’s out of tune.  
>  
> **—Miguel de Cervantes**

> Railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.  
>  
> **—E. M. Forster, *Howards End***

> Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man’s longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.  
>  
> **—Charles Baudelaire**

> Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.  
>  
> **—Sidney Hook**

> The flesh is sad, Alas! and I have read all the books.  
>  
> **—Stéphane Mallarmé, “Brise Marine”**

> Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)  
>  
> **—Dorothy Parker**