quotations about sorrow
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
The violence of sorrow is not at the first to be striven withal; being like a mighty beast, sooner tamed with following than overthrown by withstanding.
PHILIP SIDNEY
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
Deeper I'm falling
Into the arms of sorrow
Blindly descending
Into the arms of sorrow
There must be serenity
There must be deliverance
Deeper I'm falling
Blindly descending
Deeper I'm falling
KILLSWITCH ENGAGE
"The Arms of Sorrow"
Light sorrows speak, but deeper ones are dumb.
SENECA
Hippolytus
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
Joy may be a miser,
But Sorrow's purse is free.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
Persian Song
Sorrow turns the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge.
DAVID HANNAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
One sorrow never comes but brings an heir,
That may succeed as his inheritor.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
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
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
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
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
Sorrow made you,
Yeah,
In the bottom of the dark dead sea.
GAZETTE
"The Invisible Wall"
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Adonais
All sorrows are less with bread.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
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"
Joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
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