Quotes about sorrow (1014 quotes, page 6)

“What we should desire creeps silently inside us and replaces what we really desire. … We take jobs, make compromises, and settle down for the long wait, for the arrival of the future that will bring the reward of happiness we so justly deserve for our sacrifice of the pleasures of the moment. The process is so slow we scarcely notice the substitution of plastic for flesh. We forget how the body sang when it ran free; how it rejoiced in stretching, rolling, skipping, dancing, walking, eating, loving, bounding, leaping, resting.
Gradually the body beings to change to protect itself against the intrusion of joy or sorrow. It armors itself against the threat of playfulness and spontaneity. … The working body is complete when it is thus armed against those emotions that would threaten the primacy of the work ethic and the pattern of delayed gratification upon which it rests.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 102-103

Love , Pleasure , Change , Waiting

“I'll never let you see
The way my broken heart is hurting me.
I've got my pride and I know how to hide
All my sorrow and pain.
I'll do my crying in the rain.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Crying in the Rain (1962), Co-written with Howard Greenfield, first recorded by The Everly Brothers
Song lyrics, Singles

Pain , Way , Heart , Hurt

“This house is to be let for life or years;
Her rent is sorrow, and her income tears.
Cupid, 't has long stood void; her bills make known,
She must be dearly let, or let alone.”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

Book I, no. 10, Epigram 10.
Emblems (1635)

Life , Tear , Housing

“We have come here to learn about the creations, about God's secret, and about God's grace. We are the form of light. There are six kinds of lives and we are the form of light. We have come here to learn the sirr, the secret connection between ourselves and His power, to study our Father and the story of where we were before. Within this body, within this show, there is much we must learn. We have come here to learn, not to dance on this dramatic stage or to watch show after show. We have come here to open and look within everything and see our Father. Each thing that we enjoy or feel sorrow about must be opened, and we must see God within. That is the lesson we have come to learn.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God , Secret , Feeling , Study

“It does not frighten me to leave this life that my only son left five years ago, this life that insists we bear sorrow upon sorrow long after we can bear no more. No, I believe I shall gladly take my leave when the time comes. What frightens me, hamshira, is the day God summons me before him and asks, Why did you not do as I said, Mullah? Why did you not obey my laws? How shall I explain myself to him, hamshira? What will be my defense for not heeding His commands? All I can do, all any of us can do, in the time we are granted, is to go on abiding by the laws He has set for us. The clearer I see my end, hamsira, the nearer I am to my day of reckoning, the more determined I grow to carry out His word. However painful it may prove.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Talib Judge, p. 366
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

Life , God , Pain , Law

“For the desire of money is the root of all evils; which some coveting have erred from the faith, and have entangled themselves in many sorrows.”

Paul of Tarsus book First Epistle to Timothy

1 Timothy 6:10 (as quoted in Catholic Bible Douay-Rehims http://www.biblebible.com/text-bible/Catholic-Bible/1_timothy_6.asp)
First Epistle to Timothy

Money , Faith , Evil

“How stupid it was for the king to tear out his hair in grief, as if baldness were a cure for sorrow.”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

As quoted by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, iii. 26

Stupidity , Tear

“Now and always as in that morning twilight on the Galilean lake Christ comes to men. Everywhere He is present, everywhere revealing Himself. Now, as then, our eyes are holden by our own fault, so that we recognize not the merciful Presence which is all around us. Now, as then, it is they who are nearest to Christ by love who see Him first. Still Jesus joins Himself to us; still He walks with us; still He instructs us, speaking to us by His word, His providences, His Spirit; still He seeks to enter into our sorrows and trials, and to console and cheer us. But we know Him not. Our eyes are holden by unbelief. We do not press Him to abide with us. Hence He is grieved, and we are left alone in the night.”

Richard Fuller (minister) (1804–1876) United States Baptist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 96.

Love , Men , Christ , Night

“The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, — the taste and stain from the lees of the vat.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Table-Talk (1857)

Wine , Heart

“Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Pain

“Meanwhile, the Wheel turns. The humble are exalted and the mighty are humbled. The best are inevitably defeated, and the scum always rises to the top. Here is the source of all the world’s pain, that restless turning, ever accelerating, always bringing us around again to where we were before, but older, changed, scarred, and sorrowful. Had I only known the identity of the whisperer, I would never have listened. The Wheel would not have been set in motion.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 232)

Pain , World , Change

“And sorrowing I to see the sommer flowers,
The lively greene, the lusty lease, forlorne,
The sturdy trees so shattred with the showers,
The fieldes so fade, that florisht so beforne:
It taught mee well, all earthly things be borne
To dye the death: for nought long time may last:
The sommer's beauty yeeldes to winter's blast.”

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet

Source: The Induction (1563), Line 50, p. 311

Death , Beauty , Flowers , Tree

“Let all thy joys be as the month of May
And all thy days be as a marriage day:
Let sorrow, sickness, and a troubled mind
Be stranger to thee.”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

To a Bride.

Marriage , Joy

“T is now the summer of your youth. Time has not cropt the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them.”

Edward Moore (1712–1757) English dramatist and writer

The Gamester (1753), Act iii. Sc. 4.

Youth , Time , Summer

“Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows.”

Charles Reade book The Cloister and the Hearth

Source: The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), CHAPTER I

Women , Men , Suffering

“Mother:
Children and sorrow come together. First
Are sleepless nights, and cradle watchings — next
Your age is vexed with maiden fantasies,
And your girl's lover costeth you more care
Than ever did your own. It is not well!”

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

The London Literary Gazette (7th February 1835)
Translations, From the German

Children , Age , Girl , Lovers

“Please, know that for as long as I live I will be haunted with the sorrow for what I did and when I die I will have counted it more mercy than I deserved to have lived the life I did. Until that day, I want you to also know, I will spend my life trying to do things that will touch the world in a good way, to give back for all I took from you. That’s the only thing I can offer with my hands and my heart. It’s simply all I have.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

The Confession of My Crimes

Life , World , Way , Heart

“When my neighbor A—broke in business, and twenty-four hours made him a bankrupt, he came home, saying to himself, "Well, my money is gone, but Jesus is left." He did not merely come down to "hardpan," he came to something far more solid — to the everlasting arms. When another friend laid her beautiful boy in his coffin, after the scarlet fever had done its worst, she laid her own sorrowful heart upon the everlasting arms. The dear little sleeper was there already. The Shepherd had His lamb.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 594.

Money , Beauty , Home , Boy

“To the people of the United States, the death of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from March 4, 1913, to March 4, 1921, which occurred at 11:15 o'clock today at his home at Washington, District of Columbia, deprives the country of a most distinguished citizen, and is an event which causes universal and genuine sorrow. To many of us it brings the sense of a profound personal bereavement.”

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

1920s, Proclamation Upon the Death of Woodrow Wilson (1924)

Death , People , Home , Sense

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

Men , Dreams , Way , Home

“I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.”

Henry George Liddell (1811–1898) Headmaster, lexicographer, classical scholar, and dean

Source: Colin Gordon, Beyond the Looking Glass (1982), P.29.

Youth , School , Home , Thinking

“If you ask me abruptly
Why write poetry
Why not do
Something useful
Then I won't know
How to answer you
I am like a goldsmith hammering day and night
Just so I can extend pain
Into a gold ornament as thin as a cicada's wing
I don't know if working so hard
To transform sorrows into
Shimmering words and phrases
Is also
Beautifully worthwhile.”

Xi Murong (1943) Taiwanese poet and painter

"Poetry's Value", in Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion (David R. Godine Publisher, 2003), p. 56

Pain , Night

“There, up on deck, standing in the very entrance to his cabin and silhouetted dimly against the snow, was the figure of a man with shaven head and bare feet, wrapped in a large cape made of crimson felt. The figure knelt down and bowed to Jia Zheng, who did not recognize the features and hurried out on deck, intending to raise him up and ask him his name. The man bowed four times, and now stood upright, pressing his palms together in monkish greeting. Jia Zheng was about to reciprocate with a respectful bow of the head when he looked into the man's eyes and with a sudden shock recognized him as Bao-yu.
'Are you not my son?' he asked.
The man was silent and an expression that seemed to contain both joy and sorrow played on his face. Jia Zheng asked again:
'If you are Bao-yu, why are you dressed like this? And what brings you to this place?'
Before Bao-yu could reply two other men appeared on the deck, a Buddhist monk and a Taoist, and holding him between them they said:
'Come, your earthly karma is complete. Tarry no longer.'
The three of them mounted the bank and strode off into the snow. Jia Zheng went chasing after them along the slippery track, but although he could spy them ahead of him, somehow they always remained just out of reach.”

John Minford (1946) New Zealand sinologist

Source: Translations, The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: 'The Dreamer Wakes' (1986), Chapter 120

Men , Appearance , Time , Joy

“And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs!”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–1547) English Earl

"Description of Spring", line 13

Spring

“Text: Psalm 119:19. I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy command ments from me.
Are we what we dreamt we should be? No, but still the sorrows of life..., so much more numerous than we expected, the tossing to and fro in the world, they have covered it over, but it is not dead, it sleepeth.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote from van Gogh's first sermon, 29 October, 1876; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 18
1870s

Life , World , Dead

“I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Death , Secret , Family , Beauty

“She fell as falls the rose in spring,
The fairest are ever most perishing,
Yet lingers that tale of sorrow and love,
Of the Christian maid and her Moslem love;
A tale to be told in the twilight hour,
For the beauty's tears in her lonely bower.”

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

The Golden Violet - The Wreath
The Golden Violet (1827)

Love , Beauty , Spring , Tear

“Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan,
Sorrow calls no time that's gone;
Violets plucked, the sweetest rain
Makes not fresh nor grow again.”

John Fletcher (1579–1625) English Jacobean playwright

The Queen of Corinth (1647), Act III, sc. ii. Compare: "Weep no more, Lady! weep no more, Thy sorrow is in vain; For violets plucked, the sweetest showers Will ne'er make grow again", Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, "The Friar of Orders Gray".

Time

“There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day!
With night we banish sorrow.
Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my Love good-morrow!
Wings from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow:
Bird, prune thy wing! nightingale, sing!”

Thomas Heywood (1574–1641) English playwright, actor, and author

Poem Matin Song http://www.bartleby.com/101/205.html

Love , Bird , Singing , Night

“He that never had sorrow of love never had joy of it either!”

Gottfried von Straßburg book Tristan

Swem nie von liebe leit geschach,
dem geschach ouch liep von liebe nie.
Source: Tristan, Line 204

Love , Joy

“What sorrow was, thou bad'st her know,
And from her own she learned to melt at others' woe.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Hymn to Adversity http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=otad, St. 2 (1742)

Learning

“Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Demea to Philo, Part X
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Life , Pleasure , World , Disease

“Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To wast long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow.
.........
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires; 13
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendance spend!”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Mother Hubberds Tale, line 895; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life , Fear , Hope , Soul

“Our repentance is not so much sorrow for the ill we have done as a fear of the ill that may befall us.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Notre repentir n'est pas tant un regret du mal que nous avons fait, qu'une crainte de celui qui nous en peut arriver.
Maxim 180.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Fear

“Here I saw a part of the compassion of our Lady, Saint Mary: for Christ and she were so oned in love that the greatness of her loving was cause of the greatness of her pain. For in this I saw a Substance of Nature’s Love, continued by Grace, that creatures have to Him: which Kind Love was most fully shewed in His sweet Mother, and overpassing; for so much as she loved Him more than all other, her pains passed all other. For ever the higher, the mightier, the sweeter that the love be, the more sorrow it is to the lover to see that body in pain that is loved.
And all His disciples and all His true lovers suffered pains more than their own bodily dying. For I am sure by mine own feeling that the least of them loved Him so far above himself that it passeth all that I can say.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 18

Love , Pain , Feeling , Lovers

“As we be punished here with sorrow and penance, we shall be rewarded in heaven by the courteous love of our Lord God Almighty, who willeth that none that come there lose his travail in any degree. For He holdeth sin as sorrow and pain to His lovers, to whom He assigneth no blame, for love. The meed that we shall receive shall not be little, but it shall be high, glorious, and worshipful. And so shall shame be turned to worship and more joy.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 39

Love , God , Pain , Lovers

“Despite the amount of suffering, pain, misery, sorrow and travail which can exist in life, the reason for existence is the same reason as one has to play a game — interest, contest, activity and possession. The truth of this assertion is established by an observation of the elements of games and then applying these elements to life itself.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Scientology : The Fundamentals of Thought (1973).
Scientology Bulletins

Life , Pain , Truth , Game

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

Death , Hunger , Age , World

“At the end of the season of sorrows comes the time of rejoicing. Spring, like a well-oiled clock, noiselessly indicates this time.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

First lines of Zelazny's first published short story, Passion Play (1962)

Spring , Time , Season

“This is the place' is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun... When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast... There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Stone Stanford, Steinar
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Feeling , Dead , Men , Children

“Some think that He does not call her 'mother' but only 'woman' so as not to inflict a deeper wound of sorrow on her heart. I do not reject this; but another conjecture is no less probable, that Christ wanted to show that now that He has completed the course of human life, He puts off the condition in which He has lived and enters into the heavenly kingdom where He will rule over angels and men. For we know that Christ's custom always was to recall believers from looking at the flesh. This was especially necessary at His death.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Commentary on John 19:26
St John

Life , Death , Men , Angels

“Making the movie Babe opened my eyes to the intelligence and the inquisitive personalities of pigs. These highly social animals possess an amazing capacity for love, joy and sorrow that makes them remarkably similar to our beloved canine and feline friends.”

James Cromwell (1940) American actor and producer

Said in a press statement for SaveBabe campaign, as quoted in "James Cromwell: King Lear, Babe and the Black Panthers" http://www.nouse.co.uk/2007/10/26/james-cromwell-king-lear-babe-and-the-black-panthers/ in Nouse (26 October 2007)

Love , Intelligence , Animals , Joy

“Every joy brings the sorrow of its absence in its wake.”

Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher

Zire Notes (May 2004 - December 2006)

Joy

“Other sorrows soften the heart, — poverty hardens it. Nothing like poverty for chilling the affections and repressing the spirits. Its annoyances are all of the small and mean order; its regrets all of a selfish kind; its presence is perpetual; and the scant meal, and the grudged fire, are repeated day by day, yet who can become accustomed to them?”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Heart , Selfishness

“In this city I must visit the abodes of sorrow: but as yet no way has opened: no person offered to go along with me, which has made me determine to do nothing but what connot be avoided of a public nature. O that my little labour of love were finished, and comfortably completed to the joy of such who might hail me a welcome stranger on Zion's happy Coast, where my mansion of bliss awaits me, after all the storms of life are past.”

Dorothy Ripley (1767–1832) missionary

Letter to Abigail Eames (14 October 1805), p. 204
The Bank of Faith and Works United (1819)

Love , Life , Way , Nature

“A few months ago I read an interview with a critic; a well-known critic; an unusually humane and intelligent critic. The interviewer had just said that the critic “sounded like a happy man”, and the interview was drawing to a close; the critic said, ending it all: “I read, but I don’t get any time to read at whim. All the reading I do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV, and I don’t listen to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative personality.”
As I thought of that busy, artless life—no records, no paintings, no plays, no books except those you lecture on or write articles about—I was so depressed that I went back over the interview looking for some bright spot, and I found it, one beautiful sentence: for a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing “at whim”. The critic said that once a year he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or an article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives, but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence: Read at whim! read at whim!”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, pp. 112–113
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Love , Life , Books , World

“The man whose silent days
In harmless joys are spent,
Whom hopes cannot delude,
Nor sorrow discontent:That man needs neither towers
Nor armour for defence,
Nor secret vaults to fly
From thunder's violence.”

Thomas Campion (1567–1620) English composer, poet and physician

The Man of Life Upright

Secret , Hope , Joy , Flying

“How sorrowful is women's lot!" she cried.
"We all partake of woe, our common fate.”

Nguyễn Du The Tale of Kieu

Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 83–84

Women , Fate

“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, but only saps today of its strength.”

A. J. Cronin (1896–1981) Scottish novelist and physician

As quoted in Today's Gift : Daily Meditations for Families (1985) by Hazelden Publishing, p. 11

“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos’d to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable, that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation the same for a century together. A good-natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be trac’d up to its first principles.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 11
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Love , Men , Children , Feeling

“Thou art gone to the grave; but we will not deplore thee,
Though sorrows and darkness encompass the tomb.”

Reginald Heber (1783–1826) English clergyman

"At a Funeral", No. II.
need further publication dates

Art

“It is known that afore miracles come sorrow and anguish and tribulation; and that is for that we should know our own feebleness and our mischiefs that we are fallen in by sin, to meeken us and make us to dread God and cry for help and grace. Miracles come after that, and they come of the high Might, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, shewing His virtue and the joys of Heaven so far at it may be in this passing life: and that to strengthen our faith and to increase our hope, in charity. Wherefore it pleaseth Him to be known and worshipped in miracles. Then signifieth He thus: He willeth that we be not borne over low for sorrow and tempests that fall to us: for it hath ever so been afore miracle-coming.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 36

Life , Wisdom , God , Faith

“The entire purpose of a clean and well-ordered life is to liberate man from the thralldom of chaos and the burden of sorrow. (…) What is wrong with a life which is free from problems? Personality is merely a reflection of the real. (…) Once you realize that the person is merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself, you cease to fret and worry. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Clean, well-ordered life
Source: "I am That.' P.33.

Life , Problem , Reality , Personality

“To these trusted public servants and to my family and those close friends of mine who have followed me down a long, winding road, and to all the people of this Union and the world, I will repeat today what I said on that sorrowful day in November 1963: "I will lead and I will do the best I can." But you must look within your own hearts to the old promises and to the old dream. They will lead you best of all.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Inaugural address (1965)

People , World , Family , Dreams

“His reasoning had been introverted, turned from an examination of men as mammals and devoted to a sorrow that sinful and aching souls should not more readily seek the security of a mystic process known as Conviction, Repentance, and Salvation, which he was assured by the noblest and most literate men he had ever known, was guaranteed to cure all woe. His own experience did not absolutely confirm this.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

Men , Soul

“Who can say what obscure forces were then at work in a heart that had never been tamed? I was to ask myself that question over and over before I knew the answer — and then it was too late. Some secret remorse? Some unaccountable sorrow? Fear of seeing this incomparable happiness slip away from his grasp? And in that case, some terrible temptation to smash at once, and irrevocably, this rare treasure he had won …”

Alain-Fournier book Le Grand Meaulnes

Source: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), Ch. 9.

Secret , Fear , Question , Heart

“We are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or an egg collection, without feeling very much the worse for it, is it not.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part I, p. 50
Watt (1943)

Life , Feeling , Personality

“Learn to recognise the mother in Evil, Terror, Sorrow, Denial, as well as in Sweetness and in Joy.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Address to his English disciples, as quoted in The life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel, 5th edition (1960) by Romain Rolland, p. 53

Learning , Evil , Joy

“No man loves God who hates his kind,
Who tramples on his brother's heart and soul;
Who seeks to shackle, cloud, or fog the mind
By fears of hell has not perceived our goal.

God-sent are all religions blest;
And Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
To give the heavy laden rest
And peace from sorrow, sin, and strife.

Behold the Universal Spirit came
To all the churches, not to one alone;
On Pentecostal morn a tongue of flame
Round each apostle as a halo shone.

Since then, as vultures ravenous with greed,
We oft have battled for an empty name,
And sought by dogma, edict, cult, or creed,
To send each other to the quenchless flame.

Is Christ then twain? Was Cephas, Paul,
To save the world, nailed to the tree?
Then why divisions here at all?
Christ's love enfolds both you and me.

His pure sweet love is not confined
By creed which segregate and raise a wall.
His love enfolds, embraces human kind,
No matter what ourselves or Him we call.

Then why not take Him at His word?
Why hold to creeds which tear apart?
But one thing matters, be it heard
That brother love fill every heart.

There's but one thing the world has need to know.
There's but one balm for all our human woe:

There's but one way that leads to heaven above--
That way is human sympathy and love.”

Max Heindel (1865–1919) American asrologer and occultist

Creed or Christ (1909)
Source: http://www.rosicrucian.com/rcc/rcceng00.htm http://www.rosicrucian.com/rcc/rcceng00.htm

Love , Life , God , Hate

“You know my tendency is always to imagine things in my head and to work from this idea. I am going to explain my theory of blue, yellow and red, which will probably seem as 'Spanish' to you as my face.
Blue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by the other two. For example, if you mix serious, spiritual blue with red, you intensify the blue to unbearable sorrow, and yellow the conciliatory, the complementary color to purple, becomes indispensable... If you mix red and yellow to make orange, you turn passive, feminine yellow into a Fury, with sensual force that again makes cool, spiritual blue indispensable, the man..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote in Franz Marc's letter to August Macke, Dec. 1910; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 129
1905 - 1910

Color , Imagination , Idea

“What do you get when you fall in love?
You only get lies and pain and sorrow
So, for at least, until tomorrow
I'll never fall in love again”

Hal David (1921–2012) American lyricist

Song I'll Never Fall In Love Again

Love , Pain

“I would like to stress that the obligation [of being Queen] has always been driven by joy. The joy is rooted in the warmth that has met me and my family everywhere through every year, in celebration and joy as in sorrow, in the so-called "big days", as well as in everyday life.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

Ruby Jubilee speech, http://www.altinget.dk/artikel/dronningens-jubilaeumstale (15 January 2012).
Queenship

Life , Family , Joy

“The slave is a man, "the image of God," but "a little lower than the angels;" possessing a soul, eternal and indestructible; capable of endless happiness, or immeasurable woe; a creature of hopes and fears, of affections and passions, of joys and sorrows, and he is endowed with those mysterious powers by which man soars above the things of time and sense, and grasps, with undying tenacity, the elevating and sublimely glorious idea of a God. It is such a being that is smitten and blasted. The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine. It cuts him off from his Maker, it hides from him the laws of God, and leaves him to grope his way from time to eternity in the dark, under the arbitrary and despotic control of a frail, depraved, and sinful fellow-man. As the serpent-charmer of India is compelled to extract the deadly teeth of his venomous prey before he is able to handle him with impunity, so the slaveholder must strike down the conscience of the slave before he can obtain the entire mastery over his victim.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Nature of Slavery. Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 1, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Men , God , Fear , Law

“Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—
And that cannot stop their tears.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

The Cry of the Children http://www.webterrace.com/browning/The%20Cry%20Of%20The%20Children.htm, st. 1 (1844).

Children , Tear

“This hath ever been a comfort to me, that I chose Jesus to my Heaven, by His grace, in all this time of Passion and sorrow; and that hath been a learning to me that I should evermore do so: choose only Jesus to my Heaven in weal and woe.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 19

Learning , Passion , Time

“It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving men…. He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded…. When at last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stock-still amazed…. John… sat in a half-maze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady's arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all?… If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard, aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility…. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home — the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother…. It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, 'will you step this way please sir?'… The manager was sorry, very very sorry — but he explained that some mistake had been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, of course… before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square… and as he passed the park he buttoned his coat and said, 'John Jones you're a natural-born fool.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire....
Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. XIII: Of the Coming of John

Life , Men , Money , World

“Two inward vultures, Sorrow and Disdain.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Dagl'interni avoltoj, sdegno e dolore.
Canto X, stanza 6 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

“Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do't tomorrow.”

John Fletcher (1579–1625) English Jacobean playwright

Act II, scene ii.
Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother, (c. 1617; revised c. 1627–30; published 1639)

Drink

“Remarkably enough, the reason you are so disturbed about the facts of life that might make you fearful, sorrowful, and angry is that whenever something arises that you might appropriately be angry, fearful, or sorrowful about, you do not feel it completely. You limit your feeling of even these reactions. And you certainly limit your feeling of the circumstance, or the condition, that is arising. You are always exhibiting the evidence of limited feeling, obstructed feeling. If feeling becomes limitless, if you do not contract, then feeling becomes Being Itself — no reaction, no contraction, Feeling without limit. That Feeling goes beyond fear, sorrow, anger, and conventional happiness and loving attitudes. What is It? It is Love-Bliss. It is the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Force of Being, without the slightest obstruction. It is Divine Enlightenment.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/index.html

Love , Life , Fear , Feeling

“For in the sight of God all man is one man, and one man is all man. This man was hurt in his might and made full feeble; and he was stunned in his understanding so that he turned from the beholding of his Lord. But his will was kept whole in God’s sight; — for his will I saw our Lord commend and approve. But himself was letted and blinded from the knowing of this will; and this is to him great sorrow and grievous distress: for neither doth he see clearly his loving Lord, which is to him full meek and mild, nor doth he see truly what himself is in the sight of his loving Lord. And well I wot when these two are wisely and truly seen, we shall get rest and peace here in part, and the fulness of the bliss of Heaven, by His plenteous grace.
And this was a beginning of teaching which I saw in the same time, whereby I might come to know in what manner He beholdeth us in our sin.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 51
Context: The Lord that sat stately in rest and in peace, I understood that He is God. The Servant that stood afore the Lord, I understood that it was shewed for Adam: that is to say, one man was shewed, that time, and his falling, to make it thereby understood how God beholdeth All-Man and his falling. For in the sight of God all man is one man, and one man is all man. This man was hurt in his might and made full feeble; and he was stunned in his understanding so that he turned from the beholding of his Lord. But his will was kept whole in God’s sight; — for his will I saw our Lord commend and approve. But himself was letted and blinded from the knowing of this will; and this is to him great sorrow and grievous distress: for neither doth he see clearly his loving Lord, which is to him full meek and mild, nor doth he see truly what himself is in the sight of his loving Lord. And well I wot when these two are wisely and truly seen, we shall get rest and peace here in part, and the fulness of the bliss of Heaven, by His plenteous grace.
And this was a beginning of teaching which I saw in the same time, whereby I might come to know in what manner He beholdeth us in our sin. And then I saw that only Pain blameth and punisheth, and our courteous Lord comforteth and sorroweth; and ever He is to the soul in glad Cheer, loving, and longing to bring us to His bliss.

Love , God , Peace , Understanding

“He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains…but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Los Viajes" in La Solidaridad (15 May 1889)- translated from the Spanish by Nick Joaquin

Music , Travel , Feeling , Mountain

“Blessed is the almost insensitive tree,
more blessed is the hard stone that doesn't feel,
for no pain is greater than the pain of being alive,
and no sorrow more intense than conscious life.”

Rubén Darío book Cantos de vida y esperanza

Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo,
y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente,
pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo,
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.
Cantos de vida y esperanza (1901), "Lo fatal" ("Fatalism")
Quoted in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 305.

Life , Pain , Feeling , Tree

“The joy of love is too short, and the sorrow thereof, and what cometh thereof, dureth over long.”

Thomas Malory book Le Morte d'Arthur

Book X, ch. 56
Le Morte d'Arthur (c. 1469) (first known edition 1485)

Love , Joy

“Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Country

“Oh, when a mother meets on high
The babe she lost in infancy,
Hath she not then for pains and fears,
The day of woe, the watchful night,
For all her sorrow, all her tears,
An over-payment of delight?”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Canto X, st. 11.
The Curse of Kehama (1810)

Pain , Fear , Tear , Night

“For a song I was bought
Now I lie when I talk
With a careful eye on the cue card.
Onto a stage I was pushed,
With my sorrow well rehearsed.
So give me all your pity and your money, now (all of it).”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

False Advertising
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Money , Lie

“Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Memory , Childhood

“Don't turn away, you'll create sorrow,
Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore,
You may not see me tomorrow.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Desire (1976), Oh, Sister

Time

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire; and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gate of heaven.”

Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880) American priest

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 567.

Soul , Tear , Suffering

“I hated the devil and was sick with his temptations and tortures; and I could not tell why the voice in his departing words was so sweet that when he returned often and offered himself to me, it was with sorrow I refused him. Then I discovered it was Krishna at His tricks and my hate was changed into laughter.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Hate , Laughter , Change

“There are only two answers for the handling of people from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale, neither one of which has anything to do with reasoning with them or listening to their justification of their acts. The first is to raise them on the Tone Scale by un-enturbulating some of their theta by any one of the three valid processes. The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.”

L. Ron Hubbard book Science of Survival

Source: Science of Survival (1951), p. 170.

People

“Not deep his sorrow who in silence grieves.”

Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441–1494) Italian writer

Poco ha doglia chi dolendo tace.
Sonetti e Canzoni, Book II, as reported in T. B. Harbottle's Dictionary of Quotations (French and Italian) (1904), p. 395

Silence

“He who lives to God rests in his Redeemer's love, and is trying to get rid of his old nature — to him every sorrow, every bereavement, every pain, will come charged with blessings, and death itself will be no longer the " king of terrors," but the messenger of grace.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 119.

Love , Death , God , Pain

“I never meant 2 cause u any sorrow
I never meant 2 cause u any pain
I only wanted 2 one time see u laughing
I only wanted 2 see u laughing in the purple rain.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Purple Rain
Song lyrics, Purple Rain (1984)

Pain , Time

“Always Dowland, always sorrowful.”
Semper Dowland semper dolens.

John Dowland (1563–1626) English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer

Title of a pavan in Lachrimae, or Seven Tears (1604).

“When there were periods of crisis, you stood beside him. When there were periods of happiness, you laughed with him. And when there were periods of sorrow, you comforted him.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Tribute to John F. Kennedy http://www.rfkmemorial.org/lifevision/tributetojfkatthednc/, 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City (27 August 1964)

Happiness