Sorrow Quotes - Page 30

• Mountains are nature's testimonials of anguish. They are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation. Nature's stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Writing, Agony, Mountain

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854). “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands”, p.300

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• Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure?

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Pain, May, Affection

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Edward Stowe (1889). “Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Letters and Journals”

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• Peace signifies more than the stilling of guns, easing the sorrow of war. More than escape from death, it is a way of life. More than a haven for the weary, it is a hope for the brave.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  War, Gun, Brave

  First Inaugural Address, delivered 20 January 1953

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• Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Retirement, Loss, Solitude

  Simone de Beauvoir (1972). “La vieillesse”

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• If you wish to live a life free from sorrow, think of what is going to happen as if it had already happened.

  Epictetus

  Thinking, Wish, Happened

  Epictetus, George Long (2004). “Enchiridion”, p.53, Courier Corporation

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• Where art thou, beloved To-morrow?
  When young and old, and strong and weak,
  Rich and poor, through joy and sorrow,
  Thy sweet smiles we ever seek,--
  In thy place--ah! well-a-day!
  We find the thing we fled--To-day!

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Sweet, Art, Strong

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats (1831). “The poetical works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats”, p.477

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• Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Dream, School, Blessing

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• When'er into thine eyes I see,
  All pain and sorrow fly from me.
  [Ger., Wenn ich in deine Augen sch'
  So schwindet all' mein Leid und Weh.]

  Heinrich Heine

  Pain, Eye, Pain And Sorrow

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• Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Mother, Bills, Looking Forward

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• Nothing feebler than a man does the earth raise up, of all the things which breathe and move on the earth, for he believes that he will never suffer evil in the future, as long as the gods give him success and he flourishes in his strength; but when the blessed gods bring sorrows too to pass, even these he bears, against his will, with steadfast spirit, for the thoughts of earthly men are like the day which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

  Homer

  Father, Believe, Moving

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• Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

  Doris Lessing

  Pain, Cat, Knowing

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Particularly Cats-- and Rufus”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• sorrow is easier than guilt.

  Anne Sexton

  Guilt, Easier

  Anne Sexton, Linda Gray Sexton, Lois Ames (2004). “Anne Sexton: A Self-portrait in Letters”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He who has most of heart knows most of sorrow.

  Philip James Bailey

  Heart, Knows

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• Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

  Anne Tyler

  Moving, Years, Names

  Anne Tyler (1991). “Anne Tyler: a new collection : three complete novels”, Outlet

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• It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Family, Beautiful, Mean

  1939 A Family and a Fortune, ch.10.

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• Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Past, People, Capacity

  Ivy Compton-Burnett (2012). “Mother and Son”, p.18, A&C Black

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• Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph.

  John Ruskin

  Beautiful, Death, Horse

  John Ruskin (1902*). “Works”

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• He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.

  John Ruskin

  Heart, Dust, Giving

  John Ruskin (1848). “Modern Painters”, p.6

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• How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart - to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Dream, Grief, Heart

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1833). “The Last Man”, p.180

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• Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

  Dorothy Day

  Lasts, Bitterness, Problem

  Dorothy Day (2011). “The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day”, p.13, Image

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• I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Thinking, Magic

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• Lord, for the erring thought
  Not unto evil wrought:
  Lord, for the wicked will
  Betrayed, and baffled still:
  For the heart from itself kept,
  Our thanksgiving accept.
  For ignorant hopes that were
  Broken to our blind prayer:
  For pain, death, sorrow, sent
  Unto our chastisement:
  For all loss of seeming good,
  Quicken our gratitude.

  William Dean Howells

  Gratitude, Prayer, Pain

  William Dean Howells (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated)”, p.9085, Delphi Classics

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• I think the world is like a great mirror, and reflects our lives just as we ourselves look upon it. Those who turn sad faces toward the world find only sadness reflected. But a smile is reflected in the same way, and cheers and brightens our hearts. You think there is no pleasure to be had in life. That is because you are heartsick and-and tired, as you say. With one sad story ended you are afraid to begin another-a sequel-feeling it would be equally sad. But why should it be? Isn't the joy or sorrow equally divided in life?

  L. Frank Baum

  Cheer, Tired, Heart

  L. Frank Baum (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of L. Frank Baum (Illustrated)”, p.4750, Delphi Classics

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• ought we not, from time to time, open ourselves up to cosmic sadness? ... Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate. But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge-from which new sorrows will be born for others-then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply.

  Etty Hillesum

  Revenge, Grief, Sadness

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• Our little room was morbidly quiet and sorrow was heaped in my corner like dirty snow.

  Betty MacDonald

  Dirty, Snow, Littles

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