quotations about sorrow
When sparrows build and the leaves break forth
My old sorrow wakes and cries.
JEAN INGELOW
Song of Old Love
One sorrow never comes but brings an heir,
That may succeed as his inheritor.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.
ÉMILE ZOLA
La Bête Humaine
Sorrow wrings the sad soul, and bends it down to earth.
HORACE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Happiness is valued only when sorrow is tasted.
KUNCHACKO BOBAN
"Two decades of Kunchacko Boban", onmanorama, August 9, 2017
It would seem that by our sorrows only are we called to a knowledge of the Infinite. Are we happy? The limits of life constrain us on all sides.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.
SARA TEASDALE
The Answer
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
Can calm despair and wild unrest
Be tenants of a single breast,
Or sorrow such a changeling be?
ALFRED TENNYSON
In Memoriam
I walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne'er a word said she;
But, oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me.
ROBERT BROWNING HAMILTON
Along the Road
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
Sorrows are like thunderclouds--in the distance they look black, over our heads scarcely gray.
JEAN PAUL RICHTER
Hesperus
The sorrowful dislike the gay, and the gay the sorrowful.
HORACE
Epistles
Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.
JOHN WEBSTER
The Duchess of Malfi
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
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 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
Ah, don't be sorrowful, darling,
And don't be sorrowful, pray;
Taking the year together, my dear,
There isn't more night than day.
ALICE CARY
Don't Be Sorrowful, Darling
Great things can rise from fetid pits of wanton death and sorrow.
PETE ABRAMS
Sluggy Freelance, December 22, 2017
Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit