Quotes about tears
page 11

“From me you fly! Ah! let me crave,
By these poor tears, that hand you gave—
Since, parting with my woman's pride,
My madness leaves me nought beside—
By that our wedlock, by the rite
Which, but begun, could yet unite,
If e'er my kindness held you bound,
If e'er in me your joy you found,
Look on this falling house, and still,
If prayer can touch you, change your will.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IV, p. 123

Change, Joy, Parting, Housing

“Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
The present works of present man —
A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Ode to Tranquility", st. 4 (1801)

Smile

“If we believe, as we do, in our political theory that the people are the guardians of government, we should not subject our government to the bitterness and hatred of those who have not been born of our tradition and are not willing to yield an increase to the strength inherent in our institutions. American liberty is dependent on quality in citizenship. Our obligation is to maintain that citizenship at its best. We must have nothing to do with those who would undermine it. The retroactive immigrant is a danger in our midst. His discontent gives him no time to seize a healthy opportunity to improve himself. His purpose is to tear down. There is no room for him here. He needs to be deported, not as a substitute for, but as a part of his punishment. There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

People, Law, Time, Parting

“The puella mother who has never taken up residence in her own body, and therefore fears her own chthonic nature, is not going to experience pregnancy as a quiet meditation with her unborn child, nor birth as a joyful bonding experience. Although she may go through the motions of natural childbirth, the psyche/soma split in her is so deep that physical bonding between her and her baby daughter does not take place. Her child lives with a profound sense of despair, a despair which becomes conscious if in later years she does active imagination with her body and releases waves of grief and terror that resonate with the initial, primal rejection. […] The body that appears in dreams wrapped in fire, encircled by a black snake or encumbered by a fish tail from the waist down, may be holding a death-wish too deep for tears.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Pregnant Virgin (1985), p. 37

Death, Fear, Dreams, Imagination

“Mosul is the site of a very famous old Iraqi university. The American forces were refurbishing the place. They were going to tear down some of the outer walls, give this palace to the university. They'd also connected the university to the Internet and to the Web. Helped people contact scholars on the outside world. That was all the job of these very good- humored, very thoughtful officers who were really helping to rebuild the place… I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Interview with Gibson https://web.archive.org/web/20030810014618/http://michaeltotten.com/ (July 2003), Vanity Fair. 2000s, 2003

People, World, Sense, Universe

“But most, thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”

William Blake London

London, st. 4
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)

Marriage, Youth

“Every transgression is a game, every grief easy to bear compared with having discovered beauty; it was at once the crime that could never be atoned and the hurt that could never be assuaged, the tear that could never be dried.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

Beauty, Game, Hurt

“Flood your mind with love. Look into the eyes of the other and embrace the person with whom you have quarreled. Words are not necessary. Both will have their eyes flooded, and the joy of tears will wash away all quarrels.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Love, Joy, Personality

“(Sylvia at typewriter) Common misunderstandings of young married couples. (Young husband to tearful wife) Jeannie, when I said that your dinner tasted like airplane food, that was meant as a compliment.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 55

Food

“But instead I kept my tears inside,
cause I knew if I,
started I'd keep crying for the rest of my life with you,
I finally built up the strength to walk away,
don't regret it,
but I still live with the side effects.”

Mariah Carey (1970) American singer-songwriter

"Side Effects", "E=MC²", 2008
Lyrics

Life, Cry

“The faded photographs
The frames of broken glass
The shattered memories
Time will soon erase all these souvenirs
Falls from a thousand tears
But when I wake up you are never there.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Pieces of a Dream
Pieces of a Dream (2005)

Memory, Time

“Why tear off a single page when you can throw away the book?”

Aaron Weiss

Torches Together.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

Books

“After a moment she let go of him and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to both of them.
“Don’t be, child,” said Trixie. “Sometimes crying is the best medicine you can give yourself.”
“I never cry,” Maggie said, hearing the tears in her voice, and the anger. “Crying’s for people who are helpless.”
“Who told you that?” asked Trixie.
“Learned it from looking around.”
“Well, it’s not true. You can’t always judge by appearances. Crying’s a power tool to cleanse the soul, if you use it right. I think you used it right. Do you feel helpless?””

Nina Kiriki Hoffman (1955) American writer

“No,” said Maggie.
Source: The Thread That Binds the Bones (1993), Chapter 11 (p. 105)

People, Feeling, Soul, Thinking

“And I'll go where I've longed to go,
So long, away from tears.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

They Won't Go When I Go
Song lyrics, Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974)

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick… You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Poetic Manifesto

God, Joy

“Despite what you hear, we don't need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again. Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Speech http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/02/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-slogan-219908 (February 2016) Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

“Tom Strong and the rest of the ABC bunch leave me cold for a lot of reasons. First—and I realize this is purely subjective, but what isn’t?—I find a smugness, a condescension that reads to me as nostalgia being done by someone who is not in the least bit nostalgic. Almost as if Moore sits down to write and flips his brain 180°, so he’s not really writing what he feels or what he likes, just the exact opposite of what he would usually write.

Also, there is the whole pastiche/homage/whatever thing. I find this really annoying. Not just when Moore does it. I can look back on elements of my own work and be annoyed at myself for going down that path. I only did it on rare occasions, tho. Moore has turned it into a career. So much so, that in the post-Watchmen era I have trouble calling to mind much that he has done that was not based on someone else’s previous work. I am not the most original guy on the block, but at least when I do Superman, I do Superman.

I suppose a lot of this could simply be the bad taste his earlier work left for me. All that tearing down and “deconstructionism.””

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

All that revealing of the flaws and feet of clay, not a bit of which has served the industry in any positive way, and, in fact, has left huge scars across it, like the ones left in the landscape by open pit mining.
Alan Moore

Way, Guy, Feeling, Nostalgia

“Thou shalt be—what? You cannot fill it in. You cannot tear asunder the cloud that separates you from tomorrow. You do not know what is in store for you. Thou shalt be—let him fill it in for you. Thou shalt be—pure, honest, true, reverent, unselfish, loving, loyal, victorious, filled with divine discontent with mere material and physical pleasures, eager to be of service to thy fellows, willing to deny thyself, take up the cross and follow me. …Thou art—yes. …You shall be—but only as you turn to Jesus Christ. …And when you find him you will discover that he is the key to vaults of hidden treasures in your own life.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 38

Love, Life, Pleasure, Art

“And others came… Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and GloOms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; — the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XIII
Adonais (1821)

Pleasure, Fear, Family, Smile

“This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of inward ecstasy, — knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

17 March 1870
Source: Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

Age, World, Sadness, Dreams

“I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, Women, God

“To these crocodile tears they will add sobs, fiery sighs, and sorrowful countenance.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 2, subsection 4.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III

“There's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing.”

Orson Scott Card book Lost Boys

Lost Boys (1992)

People, World, Feeling, Understanding

“To live one must give one's all,
strength, passion, enthusiasm, the days of one's youth;
be fearless before pain, with tears restrained,
unable to smile, yet still ready to love and to care.”

Shushanik Kurghinian (1876–1927) Armenian poet

Source: SW 339

Love, Pain, Youth, Smile

“Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

"The American Movement" http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1898/america.htm (written 1898, first published 1908)

Water, Appearance

“Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches in the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skilfully constructed, could do; nay, which brings to view even the throne of God, and pierces the nebulous distance where are those eternal verities in which true life consists.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Life Thoughts (1858), p. 20

Life, God, Star

“It was abundantly clear from his letters that, virtually to the end, he remained deeply interested in national and world events. Yet he never ceased to engage in self-deprecating humor. I have a file containing a decade of correspondence with my dear friend. It is a file that I will keep. Max's death on April 19 was not unexpected and I am sure he would have viewed it as merciful. At the moving funeral service at Fort Meyer, Ambassador Philip Bonsal, a respected diplomat and longtime friend of the Taylors', spoke eloquently of General Taylor's "example", and correctly said that his friendship would remain a constant treasure in the lives of all of us who knew him. His younger son Tom's superb tribute brought tears to the eyes of most of us. He emphasized the closeness of the Taylor family- a closeness not often found in the lives of the world's great leaders. It typifies the mind and spirit that I was privileged to know. Maxwell Taylor's place in history will be a large one.”

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907–1998) American judge

As quoted in General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen (1989) by John Martin Taylor, p. xiv.
1980s

Death, Friendship, World, Family

“He wondered why he stayed with her. Just pure laziness, he guessed. He didn't want to go through the emotional turmoil of leaving her. In spite of himself he'd worry about her and it was too much trouble. He'd need another woman right away and that took a lot of talking and arguing and persuading. It was different just to lay a girl but he would need a woman around, and that was the difference. You got used to one and it was less trouble. […]
But there was another reason too. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. And you can't leave a thing like that. It's a structure and it has an architecture, and you can't leave it without tearing off a piece of yourself. So if you want to remain whole you stay no matter how much you may dislike staying. Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 8

Love, Fools, Girl

“Whatever it takes to fulfill his mission
That is the way we must go
But you've got to do it your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God?
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)

Way

“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull…. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Opening paragraph of his review of The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Books, Beauty, Boy, Suffering

“So, they'd prefer me to do a nude, would they? Fine I'll do them a nude... I'll redo it [his painted copy of Giorgioni's 'Woman with musicians'], with a transparent atmosphere, like those women over there [women bathing in the river, Summer of 1862]. Then I suppose they'll really tear me to pieces. They'll tell me I'm just copying the Italians now, rather than the Spanish. Ah, well, they can say what they like.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

the painting Manet means here became his most famous one: 'Déjeuner sur l'herbe'
Manet's quote to his friend Antonin Proust in 1862, from Manet, Francoise Cachin, Barrie & Jenkins, London 1991, p. 16
1850 - 1875

Women, Summer, Painting

“After one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie." I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?… Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

Review for Shoeshine (1946) as quoted in Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (2004) by Craig Seligman.

Life, People, Feeling, Girl

“When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's "Mémoires," and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them-would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my been grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/140/mode/1up pp. 140-141

Boy, Reading, Happiness, Dead

“Oh it tears me up
I try to hold on but it hurts too much
I try to forgive, but it's not enough to make it all okay.”

James Morrison (1984) English singer-songwriter and guitarist

Broken Strings
Song lyrics, Undiscovered (James Morrison album) (2006)

Forgiveness, Hurt

“Rough wind, the moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, —
Wail, for the world's wrong!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Dirge http://poetryarchive.bravepages.com/RSTU_poets/shelley_percy.b.htm#dirge (1821)

World, Sadness, Night

“The question is not merely what we can feel, but what we can do for Christ; not how many tears we can shed, but how many sins we can mortify; not what raptures we can experience, but what self-denial we can practice; not what happy frames we can enjoy, but what holy duties we can perform; not simply how much we can luxuriate at sermon or at sacrament, but how much we can exhibit of the mind of Jesus in our intercourse with our fellow men; not only how far above earth we can rise to the bliss of heaven, but how much of the love and purity of heaven we can bring down to earth; in short, not how much of rapt feeling we can indulge, but how much of religious principle we can bring to bear on our whole conduct.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 126.

Love, Men, Feeling, Question

“In early 1981 one of the most important moments in my life occurred. I entered a vivisection lab … In one of the cages, I saw a young Alaskan malamute … The dog tried to lick my face through the bars. Maybe he thought I had come to save him. I saw the infected stitches in the belly, oozing pus and blood. I saw the filthy, encrusted tube that was draining fluid out of his stomach. And as I held him, I saw the rotted stitches start to come apart and his guts start to spill out. As gently as I could, I let him down onto the floor of the cage and placed my hand on him, trying to comfort him in those last few moments of his life. I was still holding him when at last he took his final struggling breaths and died. It seemed to take a lifetime. I was close to tears as I looked at the body, and I thought, this isn’t science — this is madness. Standing there, looking at that gentle animal lying dead in a bloody cage, I made a promise to him and to myself, that I would never forget him, that I would keep on fighting vivisection until it was ended.”

Chris DeRose (1948) American actor and activist

"Chris DeRose: Vegan Easy Challenge Ambassador", interview with VeganEasy.org (2011) https://web.archive.org/web/20111012130026/http://veganeasy.org/Chris-DeRose.

Life, Dogs, Lying, Science

“Today the people stand at the door of the university, and it is the university that must be flexible. It must color itself black, mulatto, worker, peasant, or else be left without doors. And then the people will tear it apart and paint it with the colors they see fit.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech at the University of Las Villas (1959)

People, Color, Universe, Painting

“The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that -- as odd as it sounds -- one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in an idea, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. 'How can a yogi ever feel worried?... That question I have been expecting for a very long time!' (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) 'And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!' It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's 'self-image.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.
Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 150

People, Feeling, Idea, Question

“Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Power of the Dog, Stanza 1 (1909).
Other works

Dogs, Sister, Heart

“Eyes open wide, looking at the heavens with a tear in my eye.”

Richard Ashcroft (1971) English singer-songwriter

Urban Hymns (1997)

“The blood will follow where the knife is driven,
The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

The Revenge, Act V, sc. ii.

“Halloween is so close I can practically taste the children's tears.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

18 September 2013 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/380346681117507584 Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Children

“An Alma girl! oh shame, deep shame,
To Brahma's race and Brahma's name!
Unmarked, unpitied, she turned aside,
For a moment her bursting tears to hide.
None thought of the Bayadere, till the fire
Blazed redly and fiercely the funeral pyre,
Then like a thought she darted by,
And sprang on the burning pile to die!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Bayadere from The London Literary Gazette (30th August, 6th and 13th September 1823)
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Girl

“His shroud was damp, his face was white:
He said,—"I cannot sleep,
Your tears have made my shroud so wet;
Oh, mother, do not weep!"
Oh, love is strong!—the mother's heart
Was filled with tender fears;
Oh, love is strong!—and for her child
Her grief restrained its tears.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Little Shroud from The London Literary Gazette (28th April 1832)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love, Fear, Sleep, Strong

“And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
'My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.”

Wilfred Owen The End

The End

Death, Heart, Sea

“There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more — there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment in actual help.”

Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) English theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 574.

Beauty, Help

“We were high above fields, and there far, far below, was a small shadow as of a great bird tearing along the neatly marked off fields. It gave me the most tremendous shock to realize for the first time the terrific speed we were going at and that that shadow meant us — us, like a mirror! That "bird"”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

it was us.
On her first flight.
Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

Bird, Time, Speed

“The moment on the town hall balcony was very heartfelt and I was moved to tears by the fantastic welcome from all the people in the street looking up on us where we stood. We felt like royalty at that moment, waving to them all down there.”

Anni-Frid Lyngstad (1945) Swedish female singer

What Made Australians The World's Most Feverish ABBA Fans? by Neil McMahon, published by The Sydney Morning Herald. 17 February 2017 http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/what-made-australians-the-worlds-most-feverish-abba-fans-20170215-gue00r.html Sydney Morning Herald interview (2017)

People

“Shine, ye stars of heaven,
On a world of pain!
See old Time destroying
All our hoarded gain;
All our sweetest flowers,
Every stately shrine,
All our hard-earned glory,
Every dream divine! Shine, ye stare of heaven,
On the rolling years!
See how Time, consoling,
Dries the saddest tears,
Bids the darkest storm-clouds
Pass in gentle rain,
While upspring in glory
Flowers and dreams again!”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Shining Stars".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

Pain, World, Dreams, Star

“[A]ssuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives (though the true number is probably larger). If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 6

Life, Soul, Universe, Joy

“Eisenhower climbed down from his jeep. Two unsmiling dogfaces with Tommy guns escorted him to a lectern in front of the church's steps. The sun glinted from the microphones on the lectern… and from the pentagon of stars on each of Ike's shoulder straps. "General of the Army" was a clumsy title, but it let him deal with field marshals on equal terms. He tapped a mike. Noise boomed out of speakers to either side of the lectern. Had some bright young American tech sergeant checked to make sure the fanatics didn't try to wire explosives to the microphone circuitry? Evidently, because nothing went kaboom. "Today it is our sad duty to pay our final respects to one of the great soldiers of the 20th century. General George Smith Patton was admired by his colleagues, revered by his troops, and feared by his foes," Ike said. If there were a medal for hypocrisy, he would have won it then. But you were supposed tp only speak well of the dead. Lou groped for the Latin phrase, but couldn't come up with it. "The fear our foes felt for General Patton is shown by the cowardly way they murdered him: from behind, with a weapon intended to take out tanks. They judged, and rightly, that George Patton was worth more to the U. S. Army than a Stuart or a Sherman or a Pershing," Eisenhower said. "Damn straight, muttered the man standing next to Lou. He wore a tanker's coveralls, so his opinion of tanks carried weight. Tears glinted in his eyes, which told all that needed telling if his opinion of Patton.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 61-62

Sadness, Fear, Way, Star

“Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

The Failure of Christianity (1913)

Life, Pain, Fear, Disease

“When one recalls the lessons of 1814, 1870 and 1914-18 it is not to be wondered at that those who dwell within daily sight of the scars due to the tearing wounds inflicted by Teutonic hands on their living land should have a natural apprehension lest the same calamities should befall again. Stripped of some of its richest provinces, Germany has still a population 50 per cent above that of France. The German is industrious, intelligent and resourceful, and although he is poor to-day such qualities soon make riches. He will therefore, so Frenchmen realise, once more become a formidable menace. The Teuton is on the French nerves. This accounts for the anxiety to keep him chained by Treaties, impoverished by levies, and overawed by armaments.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Truth about Reparations and War-Debts (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1932), p. 68.
Later life

Intelligence, Nature

“For there is a certain luxury in grief; especially when we pour out our sorrows in the bosom of a friend, who will approve, or, at least, pardon our tears.”
Est enim quaedam etiam dolendi voluptas, praesertim si in amici sinu defleas, apud quem lacrimis tuis vel laus sit parata vel venia.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 16, 5.
Letters, Book VIII

“Mary sheds tears because men call her "The Mother of God."”

Jack T. Chick (1924–2016) Christian comics writer

Chick tracts, " Why Is Mary Crying? http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0040/0040_01.asp" (1987)

Men, God

“If we are ready to tear down the walls that confine us, break the cage that imprisons us, we will discover what our wings are for.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

“If they [the Germans] attack, we will defend. If they do not attack until winter comes, then we will and will tear them to shreds!”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

Quoted in "Rickenbacker: [an autobiography]" - Page 373 - by Eddie Rickenbacker - Air pilots, Military - 1967

Winter

“You're proving to be a merciless ghost, Papa. I should have expected it, knowing you as I do, Joanna said. Her tears were coming faster now. "What do you mean to do, Papa? Shall you haunt me for the rest of my days?" Her voice broke; kneeling on the icy tiles before John's coffin, she wept bitterly.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

“It is very difficult to explain what takes place in me when I see or hear anything majestic which allows no doubt that it proceeds from the actualization of Our Maker Creator. Each time, my tears flow of themselves. I weep, that is to say, it weeps in me, not from grief, no, but as if from tenderness.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)

Time

“The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. It needs merely to be pointed out that the metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 422

Life, Education, Communication, Personality

“O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 212.

Life, Soul

“God's beloved Son, leaving the echoes of His cries upon the mountains and the traces of His weary feet upon the streets, shedding His tears over the tombs and His blood upon Golgotha, associating His life with our homes, and His corpse with our sepulchres, shows us how we, too, may be sons in the humblest vale of life, and sure of sympathy in heaven amid the deepest wrongs and sorrows of earth.”

Edward Thomson (1810–1870) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 69.

Life, God, Home, Mountain

“Socialism, or the Red Republic, is all one; for it would tear down the tricolour and set up the red flag. It would make penny pieces out of the Column Vendome. It would knock down the statue of Napoleon and raise up that of Marat in its stead. It would suppress the Académie, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the Legion of Honour. To the grand device Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, it would add “Ou la mort. It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It would ruin the rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy labour, which gives to each one his bread. It would abolish property and family. It would march about with the heads of the proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and empty them by massacres. It would convert France into the country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all that was low and small.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Statement of May 1848, as quoted in Paris Under the Commune : Or, Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege (1871) by John Leighton

Men, God, Family, Art

“Some of the bravest people in Australia are the men and women, mostly volunteers, who take on one of the deadliest enemies on this planet — bushfires. Even the word spells fear. It's only October, early for bushfires, and yet already firefighters have risked their lives in several states. And that's why I regard arsonists among the lowest of the low. Human rejects, cowards who deliberately light fires, that tear apart this tenderbox country, and put lives at risk. I want you to meet one of these serious criminals, because that's what they are. His name is Alex Gordon Noble. He lit at least ten fires, probably more, in country New South Wales over the past two months. Why did he do it? Because he was bored. And to make it even worse, he is a traitor, he was a volunteer firefighter, what firemen call the ultimate betrayal. Light a fire, sound the alarm, be a hero, helping to put it out. According to police, the 21-year-old crane driver called triple-0 seventeen times. One of his fires closed the Pacific Highway, and tied the helicopters, police and firemen for hours. He has pleaded guilty in court after turning himself into a Tronoto police station. But don't be impressed — he only did it after police visited him to question him about a fire he denied lighting. Alex Gordon Noble has been granted bail. He should not be out, he is a menace to society. I believe that fire bugs should have heavy jail sentences. They are sick, but give them treatment inside prison. This country is too vulnerable at this time of year for leniency. Ask any firefighter.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 4 October 2013.

Women, Men, People, Fear

“Jesus lives! the same comforting, helping, instructing, loving Elder Brother, as when John leaned on His bosom, as when He lifted Peter up from the waves, as when He dried Mary's tears with His, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." Jesus lives! the same almighty Saviour, Guide, Intercessor, as when He ascended to glory with the broken fetters of sin and death in His pierced hands.”

Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 94.

Love, Death, Help

“Fiction is made of life/ Of earth and clay/ Of tears and laughter/ Of blood and sweat/ Hear them, the works of an author or a painter/ The singer and the clown/ Preserve the mystery of life.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Life: Relish It!
Life: Relish It! (2012)

Life, Laughter

“I am persuaded there is no triumph equal to one achieved on the stage—it comes so immediate and so home : you have before you the mass of human beings whose sympathies are at your will; you witness the emotions which you raise, you see the tears which you command : the poet has erected the statue, but it is for you to give it life—the words must find their music on your lips—the generous sentiment, the exalted hope, the touches of deep feeling, ask their expression from you : surely such influence is among the triumphs of the mind, ay and a great and noble triumph.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Life, Hope, Music, Feeling

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Hitler's interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler, 4 May 1931,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews, New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-33. Also published under the title Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, published by Chatto & Windus in 1971
1930s

Money, Feeling, Communication, Question

“genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing, nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 21 Diaries 1951.

Life, God

“Mossadeq, the orator, is difficult to judge as a politician because of the perpetual contradictions between his words and his acts, and because of his sudden changes of mood from elation to depression before one's very eyes. His absolute certainty, violently expressed in hysterical speeches, would turn to tears and sobbing. He had frequent "diplomatic" illensses and he played out macabre comedies in which he would exclaim: "I am a-dying…" and so forth. He has been compared to Robespierre, to Renzi and even to characters from the Commedia dell' Arte.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 53
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On world leaders and statesmen

Art, Mood, Change

“With the dried blood stiff on my temples I climbed the hill, cursing the satanic way of men, yet knowing myself vile, for they had not known what they were doing, but I betrayed an innocent; and the tears— weak, whiskey tears— would not wash from my brow the blood of a little brother.”

Henry Williamson (1895–1977) British ruralist and natural history writer

The Village Book (1930) – after a killing of a badger by villagers.

Men, Way

“Sweet heart, bitter heart
Now I can't tell you apart
Cozy and cold
Put the horse before the cartThose teenage hopes
Who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to own up
To one little lie.”

Leslie Feist (1976) Canadian musician

"1 2 3 4" (written with Sally Seltmann)
The Reminder (2007)

Lie, Hope, Heart, Horse

“Matiushin's sound [composer of the Futurist opera: 'Victory over the Sun', Malevich did the stage design] shattered the object-word. The curtain was torn, by the same token tearing the scream of consciousness of the old brain. [1917]”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 266
1910 - 1920

Sun, Victory

“Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Apology

Death, Pleasure, Fear, Hope

“Barack Obama being elected. I think about how… um… how my sons will grow up only knowing a black President. [Wells with tears] I can’t explain how that’s changed America. There’s an optimism now that wasn’t there for black people.”

Brandon Flowers (1981) American indie rock singer

When asked what the most culturally significant event for him between 2000 and 2010 " Brandon Flowers On His Sons http://www.ibabycouture.com/blog/?p=3729", BabyCouture (accessed December 20, 2010)

People, Optimism, Thinking, Change

“After leaving [the International Exposition in Paris, with a lot of new machines], I went to see Courbet's exhibition; he has reduced the admission to ten cents. I stay there alone for nearly an hour and discover that the picture [ 'L'atélier' / the Painter's Studio - 1855] of his which they refused [for exposing on the official Salon in Paris ] is a masterpiece; I simply could not tear myself away from the sight of it.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 3 August, 1855; as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 236
1831 - 1863

“I really don't know if I cried. If I did, it was tears not of pain, but of the sentiments my people are made of.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Addressing reporters at post-game press conference on Roberto Clemente Day, as quoted in "Roberto Clemente's a Man of 2 Lives ... and 2 Loves" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zbYcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NWYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2327%2C2876682 by the Associated Press, in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune (July 26, 1970) Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Pain, People

“I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.”

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist

On his writing of The Jungle, in American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (1932)

Life, Hunger, Pain, Books

“[Malipiero's advice to Casanova. ] If you wish your audience to cry, you must shed tears yourself, but if you wish to make them laugh you must contrive to look as serious as a judge.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1 (Venetian Years), chap. 14 http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/chapter14.html Referenced

Cry

“Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but…
I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street
'Cause they can't make opinions meet about God,
I can't believe in you.”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Dear God".
Skylarking (1986)

God, People, Feeling, Fight

“The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is for ever in a passion.”

William Makepeace Thackeray book The Virginians

Source: The Virginians (1857-1859), Ch. 4.

Books, Justice, Passion

“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 27)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Love, Feeling, Evil, Heart

“Spring passes
and the birds cry out—tears
in the eyes of fishes”

Bashō Matsuo book Oku no Hosomichi

行く春や
鳥啼き魚の
目は泪
yuku haru ya
tori naki uo no
me wa namida
Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior and other writings, Boston, 2000, p. 4 (Translation: Sam Hamill)
Spring is passing by!
Birds are weeping and the eyes
Of fish fill with tears.
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, Tokyo, 1996, p. 23 (Translation: Donald Keene)
The passing of spring—
The birds weep and in the eyes
Of fish there are tears.
Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, New York, 1999, p. 310 (Translation: Donald Keene)
Oku no Hosomichi

Spring, Bird, Fish, Cry

“Speak the truth, by all means! Speak it so that no man can mistake the utterance. Be bold and fearless in your rebuke of error, and in your keener rebuke of wrong-doing; all Christ's witnesses are bound to be thus "valiant for the truth;" but be human and loving and gentle and brotherly the while. If you must deliver the Redeemer's testimony, deliver it with the Redeemer's tears. Look, straight-eyed and kindly, upon the vilest, as a man ought to look upon a man, both royal, although the one is wearing, and the other has pawned his crown.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 579.

Love, Truth, Error, Christ

“With deep sighs and tears, he burst forth into the following complaint: – "O irreversible decrees of the Fates, that never swerve from your stated course! why did you ever advance me to an unstable felicity, since the punishment of lost happiness is greater than the sense of present misery?"”
In hec verba cum fletu et singultu prupit. "O irrevocabilia seria fatorum quae solito cursu fixum iter tenditis cur unquam me ad instabilem felicitatem promovere volvistis cum maior pena sit ipsam amissam recolere quam sequentis infelicitatis presentia urgeri."

Geoffrey of Monmouth The History of the Kings of Britain

Bk. 2, ch. 12; p. 117.
Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain)

Fate, Sense, Happiness

“"You cannot escape me!" he roared. "Lead me into a trap and I'll pile the heads of your kinsmen at your feet! Hide from me and I'll tear apart the mountains to find you! I'll follow you to hell!"”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Frost-Giant's Daughter" (1953)

Mountain, Hell

“Listen as the wind blows from across the great divide,
Voices trapped in yearning, memories trapped in time.
The night is my companion, and solitude my guide.
Would I spend forever here and not be satisfied?And I would be the one
To hold you down,
Kiss you so hard
I'll take your breath away.
And after, I'd wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes dear.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Possession
Song lyrics, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993)

Kiss, Solitude, Memory, Time

“It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil; one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk,. Vienna is never more Vienna than Paris. Everything is raised to its apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their place. You can real here on the walls Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here...”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Two

People, Dreams, Birth, Time

“Black Santa Claus caused more tears than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

From Everybody Hates Chris second season episode, "Everybody Hates Chris"
Miscellaneous

“Not a sorrow, not a burden, not a temptation, not a bereavement, not a disappointment, not a care, not a groan or tear, but has its antidote in God's rich and inexhaustible resources.”

George C. Lorimer (1838–1904) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 282.

God, Disappointment

“Japan gets the most of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed. America, by getting out of their way so that they can adjust individually, allows them to succeed. It is not that Japan has no individualists and America no organizations, but the thrusts of the societies are different. Japan has distorted its economy and depressed its living standard in order to keep its job structure and social values as steady as possible. At the government's direction, the entire economy has tried to flex almost as one, in response to the ever-changing world. The country often seems like a family that becomes more tightly bound together when it must withstand war, emigration, or some other upheaval. America's strength is the opposite: it opens its doors and brings the world's disorder in. It tolerates social change that would tear most other countries apart. The openness encourages Americans to adapt as individuals rather than as a group.”

James Fallows (1949) American journalist

More Like Us : Making America Great Again (1989), ch. 3

War, People, World, Family

“God, I love the "fine morality" of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.”

David Weber (1952) author

quote from W.E.B. Du Havel
"Honorverse", Crown of Slaves (2004)

Love, God, People

“Each of the various specialists remains too closely concentrated upon his single specialism, too little awake to those of the others. Each sees clearly and seizes firmly upon one petal of the six-lobed flower of life and tears it apart from the whole.”

Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) British scientist and town planner

Patrick Geddes (1947). "Town Planning in Kapurthala. A Report to H.H. the Maharaja of Kapurthala, 1917". In: Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphries. p. 26.

Life, Flowers

“Nordic art casts a spell on the mind which ranges from laughter to tears and from tears to violent rage. One can see how dangerous it is, we can be tyrannized by a cynical person endowed with the power of art. Much has been said about this demonic aspect. In it lies the ultimate demand that the artist must take responsibility for the states of mind that he produces, or at least he must answer for them by knowing them in his own person. This psychic demand in both the artist and the viewer has made Expressionist art so hated by devotees of aestheticism and formalism.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255, - Jorn talks about the Nordic concept of Expressionism 1959 - 1973, Alpha and Omega', (1963–64)

Hate, Art, Laughter, Rage

“Some enacted the charade of seeking forgiveness of their victims, claiming that this was their custom and tradition, but without showing a semblance of remorse for their wicked ways. Such pretence of piety will not heal the trauma of the hostages and their loved ones for their 56-day stopover into hell. Or wash away the tears of Filipo Seavula's young wife, suddenly made widow in a violent act of treason, or her young orphaned son, or diminish the daily agony of parents, suddenly made jobless, as they strive to feed their hungry children.”

Vijay R. Singh (1931–2006) Fijian politician

Speaking Out (2006)

Love, Children, Way, Forgiveness

“Wandering through many countries and over many seas I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies, to present you with the last guerdon of death, and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken your own self away from me—alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me! Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers have been handed down—a sorrowful tribute—for a funeral sacrifice; take them, wet with many tears of a brother, and for ever, my brother, hail and farewell!”
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis Et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum, Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi, Nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Gaio Valerio Catullo list of poems by Catullus

CI, lines 1–10
Sir William Marris's translation:
By many lands and over many a wave
I come, my brother, to your piteous grave,
To bring you the last offering in death
And o'er dumb dust expend an idle breath;
For fate has torn your living self from me,
And snatched you, brother, O, how cruelly!
Yet take these gifts, brought as our fathers bade
For sorrow's tribute to the passing shade;
A brother's tears have wet them o'er and o'er;
And so, my brother, hail, and farewell evermore!
Carmina

Death, Sea, Country

“There is one wonderful thing about the dead people that were raised—we do not hear of them any more. What became of them? If there was a man in this city who had been raised from the dead, I would go to see him to-night. I would say, “Where were you when you got the notice to come back? What kind of a country is it? What kind of opening there for a young man? How did you like it? Did you meet there the friends you had lost? Is there a world without death, without pain, without a tear? Is there a land without a grave, and where good-bye is never heard?””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

Death, Pain, People, World

“Oh, could you view the melody
Of every grace
And music of her face,
You'd drop a tear;
Seeing more harmony
In her bright eye
Than now you hear.”

Richard Lovelace (1617–1658) English writer and poet

Orpheus to Beasts. Compare: "There is music in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument; for there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres", Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Part ii, Section ix; "The mind, the music breathing from her face", Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813), canto i, stanza 6.
Lucasta (1649)

Music

“What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out—not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U. S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

"Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?", pp. 282–283
The Denial of Death (1973)

Hope, Nature, Bee, Sun

Quotes about tears page 11

Quotes about tears
page 11