Sadness quotes
1.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"God, When I was alone, and had nothing, I asked for a friend to help me bear the pain, No one came, except God, When I needed a breath to rise, from my sleep, No one could help me.. except God, When all I saw was sadness, and I needed answers, No one heard me, except God, So when I'm asked.. who I give my unconditional love to? I look for no other name, except God"
"All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence."
"Somewhere there's a someone for me. Though I may be lonely now, I'll see it through somehow, to somebody's heart I know I hold the key."
"Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southern man apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance. Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again."
"Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy."
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"exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement."
"They tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat."
"A rose looks grey at midnight, but the flame is just asleep. And steel is strong because it knows the hammer and white heat."
"Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?"
"Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom."
"Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you."
"Behind every sweet smile, there is a bitter sadness that no one can ever see and feel."
"One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields - even to sadness."
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."
"It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews."
"Now even if I die, no one will be so grieved as to do himself bodily harm."
"But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness."
"Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness."
"I am an avid follower of the news, and sometimes you just can't take any more war, any more disasters, and you want to remind yourself there's beauty in the world. I wanted to show a more poetic side to my work. It was all about... a feeling of sadness, but in a cinematic kind of way. I find beauty in melancholy."
"Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words."
"I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound."
"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk."
"Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southerner apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance."
"Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way."
"There is no true joy and compassion except through the difficult emotions - all we get without the experience of fear, anger, and sadness are cheap imitations of joy and compassion - pleasantness and sentimentality."
