Grief quotes
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside grief — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me."
"The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief."
"Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises"
"A lot of songs are inspiration and help people through pain, grief and loss."
"I want people to be more open and tolerant. I want them to know that behind every stranger is a backstory that is the common denominator - for we all share in the human experience: pain, sadness, grief, lack of love, and then, with hope and help, step by step achievements."
"It is a fact that the majority of a man's griefs comes about through lack of self-control."
"[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty."
"It is foolish to pluck out one's hair for sorrow, as if grief could be assuaged by baldness."
"Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret."
"Day just smiles at me, an expression so sad that it breaks through my numbness, and I begin to cry. Those bright blue eyes. Before me is the boy who has bandaged my wounds on the streets of Lake, who has guarded his family with every bone in his body, who has stayed by my side in spite of everything, the boy of light and laughter and life, of grief and fury and passion, the boy whose fate is intertwined with mine, forever and always. "I love you," he whispers. "Can you stay awhile?"
"Anger was better than tears, better than grief, better than guilt."
"Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses"
"Forgiveness: You cannot afford to withhold forgiveness. Nothing will destroy your life more surely, for there is a great hidden grief in the denial of forgiveness. Your heart is so heavy from what you have not forgiven that you bear the offenses of another as if they were your own."
"Life is nothing but an occassional burst of laughter rising above the interminable wail of grief."
"The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom."
"The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases."
"The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making."
"Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy"
"Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is."
"(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."
