quotations about sorrow
Sorrow comes in great waves ... but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.
HENRY JAMES
letter to Miss Grace Norton, July 28, 1883
Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Times lose no time; nor do they roll idly by; through our senses they work strange operations on the mind. Behold, they went and came day by day, and by coming and going, introduced into my mind other imaginations and other remembrances; and little by little patched me up again with my old kind of delights, unto which that my sorrow gave way.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Deeper I'm falling
Into the arms of sorrow
Blindly descending
Into the arms of sorrow
There must be serenity
There must be deliverance
Deeper I'm falling
Blindly descending
Deeper I'm falling
KILLSWITCH ENGAGE
"The Arms of Sorrow"
Disappointments weigh so heavy
Leave it's wreckage all around
Once a good man, once respected
Sorrow breaks a good man down
WAYLON JENNINGS
"Another Blue Day"
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Men die, but sorrow never dies;
The crowding years divide in vain,
And the wide world is knit with ties
Of common brotherhood in pain.
SUSAN COOLIDGE
The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey
All sorrows are less with bread.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to expect it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to Fanny McCullough, December 23, 1862
Sorrow's child sits by the river
Sorrow's child hears not the water
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
"Sorrow's Child"
Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.
RITA MAE BROWN
Riding Shotgun
The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead, and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
There is not unmitigated ill in the sharpest of this world's sorrows;
I touch not the sore of thy guilt; but of human griefs I counsel thee,
Cast off the weakness of regret, and gird thee to redeem thy loss:
Thou has gained, in the furnace of affliction, self-knowledge, patience and humility,
And these be as precious ore, that waiteth the skill of the coiner:
Despise not the blessings of adversity, nor the gain thou hast earned so hardly,
And now thou hast drained the bitter, take heed that thou lose not the sweet.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Die Natürliche Tochter
How fast we learn in the day of sorrow! Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain.
HORATIUS BONAR
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Where sorrow lieth buried
The greenest herbage springs.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Afterward"
Confound not sorrow, which is divine and high, with trouble, which is menial and frivolous.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Day-thoughts feed nightly dreams;
And sorrow tracketh wrong,
As echo follows song.
HARRIET MARTINEAU
Hymn