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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"And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die."
"Grief is like a moving river, so that's what I mean by it's always changing. It's a strange thing to say because I'm at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It's just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone."
"Grief is a gift, something you have to earn."
"And I live on, but in grief and self-contempt, Left here without the light I loved so much, In a great tempest and with shrouds unkempt."
"Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end."
"Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief."
"There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy."
"The sweets of pillage can be known To no one but the thief, Compassion for integrity Is his divinest grief."
"It is better to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit, amid abundance"
"In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art."
"When we grieve over someone who has died in Christ, we are sorrowing not for them, but for ourselves. Our grief isn't a sign of weak faith, but of great love."
"Grief is selfish. It is indulged in for self-gratification, not for love. Cosmic man knows the beauty and unreality of death."
"O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last, And careful hours with Time's deformed hand Have written strange defeatures in my face. But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?"
"It were a grief so brief to part with thee. Farewell."
"It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind."
"Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine."
"Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous."
"What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something."
"The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow; and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched."
"The only thing that's real in any universe [is] that brilliant fire of Love that burns to the exclusion of everything else. As we recognize the presence of Love, we break through the wall of grief that would try to convince us that the dear soul with whom we have learned and loved so much no longer exists, or that she or he cannot speak with us. There is no wall that Love cannot vaporize. We may believe in death, Love doesn't."
