1992
[In the Company of the Holy Mother, 66-67]
Source: Basic Verities, Prose and Poetry (1943), p. 51
“Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.”
Source: 2000s, The Rescue (2000), Chapter 1, p. 9
“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”
Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)
Context: Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
“Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.”
Regretter ce que l'on aime est un bien, en comparaison de vivre avec ce que l'on hait.
Aphorism 40
Les Caractères (1688), Du Coeur
“No music was made from grief, moulded from sorrow.”
Juhani Aho. Yksin ("Alone," 1890, tr. as Seul 2013); cited in: Guri Barstad, Karen P. Knutsen (2016), States of Decadence: On the Aesthetics of Beauty, Decline and Transgression across Time and Space Volume 1. p. 2
