Sorrow Quotes - Page 31

• the human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life's sorrows.

  Agnes Sligh Turnbull

  Rest Of Life, Soul, Suffering

  15 Copy quote

• Grief - Happiness is to feel that one's soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them.

  Joseph Joubert

  Grief, Joy, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Song, Pain, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• a woman of the world should always be the mistress of sorrow and not its servant. She may have a grief but never a grievance.

  Elsie de Wolfe

  Grief, Mistress, Complaining

  Elsie De Wolfe (1974). “After all”, Ayer Co Pub

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Silence is not only never thirsty, but also never brings pain or sorrow.

  Hippocrates

  Pain, Silence, Thirsty

  12 Copy quote

• A lean sorrow is hardest to bear.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Bears, Hardest

  Sarah Orne Jewett (1895). “The Life of Nancy”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To-day is ours; what do we fear?
  To-day is ours; we have it here.
  Let's treat it kindly, that it may
  Wish, at least, with us to stay.
  Let's banish business, banish sorrow;
  To the gods belong to-morrow.

  Abraham Cowley

  Wish, May, Today

  Abraham Cowley (1679). “The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley: Consisting of Those which Were Formerly Printed : and Those which He Design'd for the Press”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.

  Freya Stark

  Art, Law, Doors

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.

  Freya Stark

  Sex, Love Is, Roots

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• O sleep, we are beholden to thee, sleep;
  Thou bearest angels to us in the night,
  Saints out of heaven with palms.
  Seen by thy light
  Sorrow is some old tale that goeth not deep;
  Love is a pouting child.

  Jean Ingelow

  Children, Angel, Sleep

  Jean Ingelow (1874). “The Poetical Works of Jean Ingelow”, p.244

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The sorrows of children are profound and unsuspected.

  Nan Fairbrother

  Children, Profound

  8 Copy quote

• The sorrows we imagine are more profound and inconsolable than real life leaves us time for.

  Nan Fairbrother

  Real, Profound, Imagination

  8 Copy quote

• Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

  Jane Addams

  Children, Attitude, Soon Enough

  Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.14, Courier Corporation

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met.

  Mary Renault

  Grief, Fate, Play

  Mary Renault (1974). “The Mask of Apollo”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Before
  We end our pilgrimage, 'tis fit that we
  Should leave corruption, and foul sin, behind us,
  But with wash'd feet and hands, the heathens dar' not
  Enter their profane temples; and for me
  To hope my passage to eternity
  Can be made easy, till I have shook off
  The burthen of my sins in free confession,
  Aided with sorrow, and repentance for them,
  Is against reason.

  Philip Massinger

  Hands, Feet, Temples

  Philip Massinger, John Ford (1848). “The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford”, p.262

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about...you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.

  Sarah Kay

  Writing, Focus, Trying

  17 Copy quote

• The ability to forget a sorrow is childhood's most enchanting feature.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Childhood, Forget, Enchanting

  Phyllis McGinley (1965). “Sixpence in Her Shoe”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bread of the world, in mercy broken,
  Wine of the soul, in mercy shed,
  By whom the words of life were spoken,
  And in whose death our sins are dead:
  Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
  Look on the tears by sinners shed;
  And be Thy feast to us the token
  That by Thy grace our souls are fed.

  Reginald Heber

  Heart, Wine, Broken

  Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans, Reginald Heber (1834). “The Poetical Works of Hemans, Heber and Pollok: Complete in One Volume”, p.26

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• we middle-aged folk have the education of life, truly; we know the multiplication table of anxieties and sorrows, the subtraction table of loss, the division table of responsibility.

  Margaret Deland

  Responsibility, Loss, Anxiety

  4 Copy quote

• Sorrow makes us very good or very bad.

  George Sand

  Very Good

  7 Copy quote

• Sorrow's faded form, and solitude behind.

  Thomas Gray

  Solitude, Form, Behinds

  Thomas Gray, John MITFORD (Vicar of Benhall.) (1814). “The Poems of Thomas Gray. With Critical Notes, a Life of the Author, and an Essay on His Poetry, by the Rev. John Mitford”, p.64

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If all men and women were kept at some useful employment there would be less sorrow and wickedness in the world.

  Dorothy Nevill

  Work, Men, Would Be

  Lady Dorothy Nevill (1912). “My own times”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Book, Ice Cream, Doe

  Natalie Goldberg (2011). “Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft”, p.87, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma. ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Memories, Ocean, Fog

  Gretel Ehrlich (1995). “A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning”, p.51, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Over my real sorrows I never weep.

  Natalia Ginzburg

  Real

  13 Copy quote