- That thorny path, those stormy skies,
- Have drawn our spirits nearer;
- And rendered us, by sorrow's ties,
- Each to the other dearer.
BERNARD BARTON, Not Ours the Vows
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace
There would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men -- and God knows why they are so fashioned -- did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
GOETHE, The Sorrows of Young Werther
What an insidious drug memory can be. Especially the memory of unhappiness.
Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Evangeline
Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutterball when you're bowling with the girls in the leage. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age: youth's burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.
O. HENRY, "The Count and the Wedding Guest"
- Joy may be a miser,
- But Sorrow’s purse is free.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD, Persian Song
- As high as we have mounted in delight
- In our dejection do we sink as low.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Resolution and Independence
- Joy's recollection is no longer joy,
- While Sorrow's memory is a sorrow still.
LORD BYRON, Marino Faliero
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, Dec. 23, 1862
It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
SUE MONK KIDD, The Secret Life of Bees
- Can calm despair and wild unrest
- Be tenants of a single breast,
- Or sorrow such a changeling be?
ALFRED TENNYSIN, In Memoriam
Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of the Christ risen.
MOTHER TERESA, A Gift for God
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.
THOMAS MOORE, "Come Ye Disconsolate"
Our comforts come from God; our sorrows, from ourselves.
- The burdens of life I'll take up now,
- But never my heart will they stain.
- If sorrows of earth fit me for heaven,
- No reason have I to complain.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "No Reason Have We to Complain"
- A sorrow's crown of sorrow
- Is remembering happier things.
ALFRED TENNYSON, Locksley Hall
- 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
In sorrow and in suffering are hidden the springs of a peace and a power that can be affected by no outward storms. It is a great thing, when one has grown strong through that trial which melts away the dross and proves the true gold; when, being driven to the handling of many expedients, he has been trained to detect all counterfeit comforts, and to discriminate between unsubstantial good and that which abides every test; when he has learned to dispense with all outward props, can let riches, honors, health drop away from him, and yet feel that all this does not touch his real life; while above these coils of uncertainty and mutation he lifts his naked personality erect in its own spiritual resources. Surely, prosperity has never generated such depths of power, such intrinsic and full consolation.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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
Sorrow may be a good thing for a woman's heart, but it is a poor cosmetic for her face.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
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