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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"You left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence, or in absence. Both mourn, the angels, the prophets, and this sadness I feel has taken from me the taste of language, so that I cannot say the flavor of my being apart."
"For only when faithfulness turns to betrayal And betrayal into trust Can any human being become part of the truth."
"How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire."
"My waking thoughts are all of thee. Your portrait and the remembrance of last night's delirium have robbed my senses of repose. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart. Are you vexed? Do I see you sad? Are you ill at ease? My soul is broken with grief, and there is no rest for your lover."
"And when [Bëor] lay dead, of no wound or grief, but stricken by age, the Eldar saw for the first time the swift waning of the life of Men, and the death of weariness which they knew not in themselves; and they grieved greatly for the loss of their friends. But Bëor at the last had relinquished his life willingly and passed in peace; and the Eldar wondered much at the strange fate of Men, for in all their lore there was no account of it, and its end was hidden from them."
"Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain."
"For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us."
"We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering."
"He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief."
"Grief is like sinking, like being buried."
"It is of no avail to know what is about to happen; for it is a sad thing to be grieved when grief can do no good."
"But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief."
"Many a smiling face hides a mourning heart; but grief alone teaches us what we are."
"I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on."
"When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss."
"I have emerged from the tunnel of grief into the light. Life is better. Not the same, but good and getting better all the time."
"Rejoicing refers to moderation of spirit when the mind keeps itself in calmness under adversity and does not give indulgence to grief. Constant praying is the way of 'rejoicing perpetually', for by this means we ask from God alleviation in connection with all our distresses."
"grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping grief is a house where no on can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out"
"How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart - to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!"
"The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished."
