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 can wade Grief -- Whole Pools of it -- I'm used to that -- But the least push of Joy Breaks up my feet -- And I tip -- drunken -- Let no Pebble -- smile -- 'Twas the New Liquor -- That was all!"
"When he tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is acquainted with grief, we listen, for that also is an acquaintance of our own."
"Sometimes you walk into things, that, if you were paying attention, vibrationally, you would know right from the beginning that it wasn't what you are wanting. In most cases, your initial knee-jerk response was a pretty good indicator of how it was going to turn out later. The things that give most of you the most grief are those things that initially you had a feeling response about, but then you talked yourself out of it for one reason or another."
"The reason that you call it 'grief' is because you've been programmed to believe that you should feel bad about death."
"Time will cure you, but now is your grief still young."
"High honors are sweet To a man's heart, but ever They stand close to the brink of grief."
"I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief"
"These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion -- wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, 'There's a sucker born every minute.' But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic -- however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney."
"Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional. Moving away from "useful" doesn't mean it isn't necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health."
"My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power of the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love."
"I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard."
"Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same."
"Grief for a dead Wife, and a troublesome Guest, Continues to the threshold, and there is at rest; But I mean such wives as are none of the best"
"Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!"
"The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief."
"Death is too much to ask of the living."
"We need grief as a precursor to emotional refreshment, and so consume it vicariously in somewhat titrated but powerful enough form through engagement with the arts."
"Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely."
"A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs; and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten in the rain."
"I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate."
