Quotes about tears

page 3

Ask the Dust (1939)

As quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1987) by Robert Andrews, p. 60

"Palm Sunday", a sermon delivered at St. Clement's Church, New York City (ndg), originally published in The Nation as "Hypocrites You Always Have With You" (ndg)
Palm Sunday (1981)
Context: Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book I, Lines 461–462 (tr. Robert Fagles)

2012, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2012)
Context: As Bill mentioned, I’ve come to CGI every year that I’ve been President, and I’ve talked with you about how we need to sustain the economic recovery, how we need to create more jobs. I’ve talked about the importance of development -- from global health to our fight against HIV/AIDS to the growth that lifts nations to prosperity. We've talked about development and how it has to include women and girls -- because by every benchmark, nations that educate their women and girls end up being more successful. And today, I want to discuss an issue that relates to each of these challenges. It ought to concern every person, because it is a debasement of our common humanity. It ought to concern every community, because it tears at our social fabric. It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime. I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name -- modern slavery.

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
If he goes out in to the street after a rainstorm and sees a worm which has strayed there, he reflects that it will certainly dry up in the sunshine, if it does not quickly regain the damp soil into which it can creep, and so he helps it back from the deadly paving stones into the lush grass. Should he pass by an insect which has fallen into a pool, he spares the time to reach it a leaf or stalk on which it may clamber and save itself.

Source: The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913), The Crowning Hour, III
Context: p>As we go star-stilled in the mystic garden,
All the prose of this life run there to rhyme,
How eagerly then will the poor heart pardon
All of these hurts of Time!Ah, yes, in that hour of our souls dream-driven,
In that high, white hour, O my wild sea-bride,
The tears and the years will be all forgiven, …
And all be justified.</p

Just Say No (1986)
Context: As a mother, I've always thought of September as a special month, a time when we bundled our children off to school, to the warmth of an environment in which they could fulfill the promise and hope in those restless minds. But so much has happened over these last years, so much to shake the foundations of all that we know and all that we believe in. Today there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country, and no one is safe from it — not you, not me, and certainly not our children, because this epidemic has their names written on it. Many of you may be thinking: "Well, drugs don't concern me." But it does concern you. It concerns us all because of the way it tears at our lives and because it's aimed at destroying the brightness and life of the sons and daughters of the United States.

Comments on the North American Events (1862)
Context: Lincoln’s proclamation is even more important than the. Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, cothurnus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be “fighting for an idea”, when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by, an idea, talks about “square feet”. He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances “to act the lion”. The most redoubtable decrees — which will always remain remarkable historical documents-flung by him at the enemy all look like, and are intended to look like, routine summonses sent by a lawyer to the lawyer of the opposing party, legal chicaneries, involved, hidebound actiones juris. His latest proclamation, which is drafted in the same style, the manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.

Queen Elinor in Rosamond (c. 1707), Act III, sc. ii.
Context: Every star, and every pow'r,
Look down on this important hour:
Lend your protection and defence
Every guard of innocence!
Help me my Henry to assuage,
To gain his love or bear his rage.
Mysterious love, uncertain treasure,
Hast thou more of pain or pleasure!
Chill'd with tears,
Kill'd with fears,
Endless torments dwell about thee:
Yet who would live, and live without thee!

Scyrii, Frag. 510.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

"Faery Songs", I (1818)
Context: Shed no tear! O shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more! O weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root's white core.

The Osbournes television show

The Town and the City (1950)
Context: He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.

Down By The Salley Gardens http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1476/
Crossways (1889)
Context: p>Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.</p

Perlen bedeuten Tränen.
Emilia Galotti http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/7mlgl10.txt (1772), Act II, scene VIII

Quicktime excerpt http://www.harappa.com/nehrumov.html
A Tryst With Destiny (1947)
Context: The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

Twenty Year Vision for America (2004)
Context: As with science and technology, there could be a dark side of globalization, in which progress for some means poverty for others, as jobs and opportunities ebb and flow, securities and currencies fluctuate in value, and the tension between private profit and public good persists. But surely these are risks that we can manage in a world with an America more attuned to its larger purpose and responsibilities.
The final frontier is perhaps the most difficult, but it's also the most important — and that's the frontier of the human spirit. For too long, people have allowed differences on the surface — differences of color, ethnicity, and gender — to tear apart the common bonds they share. And the human spirit suffers as a result.
Imagine a world in which we saw beyond the lines that divide us, and celebrated our differences, instead of hiding from them. Imagine a world in which we finally recognized that, fundamentally, we are all the same. And imagine if we allowed that new understanding to build relations between people and between nations.
Our goal for the next twenty years should be to finally recognize that our differences are our greatest strength. That's true not only here in America, but in all parts of the world, where we've allowed historic rifts to poison the well of opportunity. They've arisen from the natural prides and passion of humanity. Only when we recognize that — when we respect the human spirit — will we be a great nation and a great world. These are the steps we must take in the next twenty years, as we reach out for the newest frontiers.

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: It is not enough to speak; you must know words. When you have said, "I am in pain," or when you have said, "I am right," you have said nothing in reality, you have only spoken to yourself. The real presence of truth is not in every word of truth, because of the wear and tear of words, and the fleeting multiplicity of arguments. One must have the gift of persuasion, of leaving to truth its speaking simplicity, its solemn unfoldings. It is not I who will be able to speak from the depths of myself. The attention of men dazzles me when it rises before me. The very nakedness of paper frightens me and drowns my looks. Not I shall embellish that whiteness with writing like light. I understand of what a great tribune's sorrow is made; and I can only dream of him who, visibly summarizing the immense crisis of human necessity in a work which forgets nothing, which seems to forget nothing, without the blot even of a misplaced comma, will proclaim our Charter to the epochs of the times in which we are, and will let us see it. Blessed be that simplifier, from whatever country he may come, — but all the same, I should prefer him, at the bottom of my heart, to speak French.

Lines Written In Dejection http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1524/, st. 1
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
Context: When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.

Speech at the Brandenburg Gate. (12 June 1987)
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)
Variant: General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

After the invasion of Iraq -and after sending his tanks and artillery home- Mattis sent this message to the Iraqi leaders in every area his men served in, as quoted in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) by Thomas E. Ricks; as excerpted in Armed Forces Journal (August 2006) http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/fiasco/

The Creation of Patriarchy, Introduction, pp. 13-14
The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)

1996

Interview with Barbra Walters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohNUIVHRWWo (March 1991)

Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

Selections from the Persian Ghazals of Ghalib, p. 10
Poetry, Persian Couplets

1979

Source: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

As quoted by George P. Thayer in The Further Shores of Politics: The American Political Fringe Today, 2d ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 27.
undated

Source: + Khalid, Song Lovely

The Last Messiah (1933)
Source: trans. Peter Reed & David Rothenberg https://ia803202.us.archive.org/15/items/20200821_20200821_1659/OAP_Zapffe_Last_Messiah.pdf, page 8

Source: Statism and Anarchy (1873), "Appendix A"

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: Seven Tears Into the Sea

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood

Source: Mockingjay

Source: The Lost Colony

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Finding Alice

pp. 358-359.
Source: “Toys, Abhorsen. And too late. Much too late.”
It was not just words he spoke, but power, Free Magic power that froze Sabriel’s nerves, caught at her muscles. Desperately, she struggled to ring the bells, but her wrists were locked in place…
Tantalizingly slowly, Kerrigor glided forward, till he was a mere arm’s length away. Towering over her like some colossal statue of rough-hewn night, his breath rolling down on her with the stench of a thousand abattoirs.
Someone – a girl quietly coughing out her last breath on the floor – touched Sabriel’s ankle with a light caress. A small spark of golden Charter Magic came from that dying touch, slowly swelling into Sabriel’s veins, traveling upwards, warming joints, freeing muscles. At last it reached her wrists and hands–and the bells rang out.
It was not the clear, true sound it should be, for somehow the bulk of Kerrigor took the sound in and warped it– but it had an effect. Kerrigor slid back, and was diminished, till he was a little more than twice Sabriel’s height.
But he was not subject to Sabriel’s will. Saraneth had not bound him, and Kibeth had only forced him back.
Sabriel rang the bells again, concentrating on the difficult counterpoint between them, forcing all her will into their magic. Kerrigor would fall under her domination, he would walk where she willed…

Source: Love Medicine

Source: The Hunger Games

Source: Burn for Me

Source: Serena

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Source: Querelle of Brest

Source: Meditations

Source: Uprooted

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Captivated by You

Source: Midnight Alley

Source: The Lost Hero

Source: The Song of Achilles

[Street, 1868] ( p. 86 https://books.google.com/books?id=sAqXBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA82)
Also in Soulsalsa: 17 Surprising Steps for Godly Living in the 21st Century https://books.google.com/books?id=E2S3nWp-lAgC&pg=PT61 by Leonard Sweet [Zondervan, 2009, ISBN 0-310-83380-9]
Source: The Moonstone (1868)

Source: The Spook's Mistake

Source: The Poems Of Wilfred Owen

Source: 1Q84

Source: The Day of the Locust

Source: The Joy Luck Club

Source: Even Vampires Get the Blues

LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Source: Retribution

Source: Mine Till Midnight

Source: Fanged & Fabulous

Source: Coming Through Slaughter

Source: The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

Catherine Earnshaw (Ch. XV).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.

girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.
Visions of Cody (1960)

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

Source: In One Person

Source: The Song of Achilles

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: Lone Wolf

Source: The Book of Tea

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Sharp Objects