quotations about sorrow
Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Die Natürliche Tochter
Happiness is valued only when sorrow is tasted.
KUNCHACKO BOBAN
"Two decades of Kunchacko Boban", onmanorama, August 9, 2017
Joy may be a miser,
But Sorrow's purse is free.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
Persian Song
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.
SARA TEASDALE
The Answer
It is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excresence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Island
The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead, and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
One sorrow never comes but brings an heir,
That may succeed as his inheritor.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Men die, but sorrow never dies;
The crowding years divide in vain,
And the wide world is knit with ties
Of common brotherhood in pain.
SUSAN COOLIDGE
The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
All sorrows are less with bread.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Light sorrows speak, but deeper ones are dumb.
SENECA
Hippolytus
Times lose no time; nor do they roll idly by; through our senses they work strange operations on the mind. Behold, they went and came day by day, and by coming and going, introduced into my mind other imaginations and other remembrances; and little by little patched me up again with my old kind of delights, unto which that my sorrow gave way.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to expect it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to Fanny McCullough, December 23, 1862
A scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.
I carry this in my body, seed
in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.
But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"To Hear the Falling World"
Sorrow turns the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge.
DAVID HANNAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
There is not unmitigated ill in the sharpest of this world's sorrows;
I touch not the sore of thy guilt; but of human griefs I counsel thee,
Cast off the weakness of regret, and gird thee to redeem thy loss:
Thou has gained, in the furnace of affliction, self-knowledge, patience and humility,
And these be as precious ore, that waiteth the skill of the coiner:
Despise not the blessings of adversity, nor the gain thou hast earned so hardly,
And now thou hast drained the bitter, take heed that thou lose not the sweet.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Sorrow made you,
Yeah,
In the bottom of the dark dead sea.
GAZETTE
"The Invisible Wall"
Joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods