“The sadness within ourselves should teach us to be empathetic, that there is the sadness of others who may be so much bigger than ours, that we cannot even bear it.”

#The sadness

Last update Jan. 16, 2023. History

Related quotes

“I didn't know I had it in me. There's more to all of us than we realize. Life is so much bigger, grander, higher, and wider than we allow ourselves to think. We're capable of so much more than we allow ourselves to believe.”

Queen Latifah (1970) American musician and actress

Source: Put on Your Crown: Life-Changing Moments on the Path to Queendom

“Who wants that? I'd rather choose to fall in love and be hurt. Sometimes I can't even sleep because I love someone too much. And there's always sadness in our lives. It's that sad feeling that keeps us going. - Usagi/Sailor Moon”

Naoko Takeuchi (1967) Japanese manga artist

Source: Sailor Moon, Vol. 1

“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Art of Travel

“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.”

Mark Haddon book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?”

Ronald David Laing book The Politics of Experience

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 1 of Introduction
Context: Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social "reality". Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie. What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.

“When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“No matter how well intended our country is, we cannot expect other nations to trust us as much as we trust ourselves.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 145
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

“We should not suppress our feelings of sadness during our activism. Being upfront with these emotions shows our humanity and gives validation to others feeling the same way.”

Glacier Kwong (1996) Hong Kong human rights activist

What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 38 Glacier Kwong https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-05-04/what-could-possibly-go-right-episode-38/ (4 May 2021)

“The sadness within ourselves should teach us to be empathetic, that there is the sadness of others who may be so much bigger than ours, that we cannot even bear it.”

Related quotes

Related topics