Sad quotes

page 2

Der Gescheitere gibt nach! Ein unsterbliches Wort. Es begründet die Weltherrschaft der Dummheit.
Aphorisms (1893), p. 6

Introduction
The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
Context: "... Let us go," we said, "into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too." And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

Source: Buddha's Little Instruction Book

Source: The Kite Runner

Source: Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 43

Source: The Great Gatsby

Source: My Name Is Memory

Source: Wedding Night

Source: The Notebook

Variant: I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human.
Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: Middlesex

Source: The Cider House Rules

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: This Side of Paradise

Source: Revolutionary Road

Source: Dear John

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Source: The Dovekeepers

Source: Nineteen Minutes (2007)

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

Source: Love the One You're With

Hyperion http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5436, Bk. III, Ch. IV (1839).
Variant: Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.
Context: "Ah! this beautiful world!" said Flemming, with a smile. "Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and Heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly; and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

Source: For Darkness Shows the Stars

Source: A Walk to Remember

Source: Persuasion

Source: Adverbs

Source: The Time Keeper

No known source in Emerson's works; first found as a piece of anonymous folk-wisdom in a 1936 newspaper column:
: Every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.
:* Junius, "Office Cat" https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/85995624/, The Daily Freeman [Kingston, NY] (30 December 1936), p. 6
Misattributed

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Little Foxes (1865), Ch. 3.
Source: Little Foxes: Or, the Insignificant Little Habits Which Mar Domestic Happiness

Source: The History of Love

Adam Bede (1859)

As quoted in Visions : How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century (1999) by Michio Kaku, p. 295
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Source: Days of Magic, Nights of War

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)
Variant: 288: I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too?

Variant: Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: Less Than Zero

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Source: The Mark of Athena

Source: Club Dead

Variant: What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.

Source: Sula (1973)

Fare Thee Well http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-FTW46.htm, st. 1 (1816).
Context: Fare thee well! and if forever,
Still forever, fare thee well:
Even though unforgiving, never
'Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, p. 80.
Context: Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

On Another's Sorrow, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Source: The Life to Come and Other Stories

Source: The Bean Trees

Source: Mastery

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: The Crossing

Source: The Bean Trees

Source: Absalom, Absalom!

Discussion with his predecessor Helmut Schmidt in 'Die Zeit' (1998)

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 243

A comment regarding her divorce from Sinclair Lewis, quoted by Vincent Sheean in Dorothy and Red (1963)

Widely attributed to Milton Friedman, and sometimes cited as being in his work Capitalism and Freedom (1962) this is also attributed to Alfred P. Sloan, sometimes with citation of a statement of 1964, but sometimes with attestations to his use of it as a motto as early as 1923.
Disputed

The Observer (1964-12-27)
Misattributed to George Bernard Shaw on The West Wing, Season 2, Episode 14: The War At Home. Fictional President Bartlett, smoking a cigarette, spoke the second half of the quote and attributed it to Shaw. His chief of staff disputed whether it was Shaw, and the President concurred.

Quoted in The Unknown Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1994) edited by Bill Adler

Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse:
Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse.
Don Diègue, act III, scene v.
Le Cid (1636)

Widely attributed to Friedman, and sometimes cited as being in his work Capitalism and Freedom (1962) this is also attributed to Alfred P. Sloan, sometimes with citation of a statement of 1964, but sometimes with attestations to his use of it as a motto as early as 1923.
Disputed

From Moral Essays: Ad Marciam De Consolatione http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Marcia.html (trans. J. W. Basore)
Other works

A Jew Today (1978)

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Il n’y a point de déguisement qui puisse longtemps cacher l’amour où il est, ni le feindre où il n’est pas.
Maxim 70.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

"L'Isolement", Méditations Poétiques (1820)

"Hope, like the short-lived ray that gleams awhile", line 35.

The Story of My Life and Work, vol. I (1900), ch. XV: Cuban Education and the Chicago Peace Jubilee Address http://web.archive.org/20071031084035/www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.1/html/126.html

The Guerilla Chief
The Improvisatrice (1824)

VI, 70.
Variant translations:
It is not life to live, but to be well.
Life's not just being alive, but being well.
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)

The Devil's Disciple, Act II (1901)
1900s