quotations about sorrow
Joy may be a miser,
But Sorrow's purse is free.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
Persian Song
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
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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
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
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 comes in great waves ... but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.
HENRY JAMES
letter to Miss Grace Norton, July 28, 1883
Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Die Natürliche Tochter
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
Light sorrows speak, but deeper ones are dumb.
SENECA
Hippolytus
Disappointments weigh so heavy
Leave it's wreckage all around
Once a good man, once respected
Sorrow breaks a good man down
WAYLON JENNINGS
"Another Blue Day"
Sorrow made you,
Yeah,
In the bottom of the dark dead sea.
GAZETTE
"The Invisible Wall"
Where sorrow lieth buried
The greenest herbage springs.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Afterward"
Sorrow's child sits by the river
Sorrow's child hears not the water
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
"Sorrow's Child"
Our days and nights
Have sorrows woven with delights.
FRANÇOIS DE MALHERBE
To Cardinal Richelieu
All sorrows are less with bread.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Island
Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.
RITA MAE BROWN
Riding Shotgun
Past sorrows, let us moderately lament them;
For those to come, seek wisely to prevent them.
JOHN WEBSTER
The Duchess of Malfi