Sadness quotes
1.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside sadness — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of images before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed."
"Common one, my illuminated one, oh my high in the art of suffering. Take a walk with me."
"Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness."
"There would be no sequel to the sadness"
"I know,' said Erin, and described how she'd lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans - more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem 'darker."
"Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out."
"The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness."
"She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced."
"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it."
"We never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart."
"I think I'm comfortable making myself, or my speaker, larger than life if I can then cut myself off at the ankles. The way, in "My Major Prize," the speaker does this drippy performance of sadness and poetry for some unnamed prize committee, only he lets us know that it's all a wry game."
"There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure."
"I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness."
"I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags."
"I believe there is a place where the restless souls wander. Burdened by the weight of their own sadness, they cannot enter heaven.... And so they wait, trapped between our world and the next, endlessly searching for a way to rid themselves of their pain- in the hope that somehow, someday they will be reunited with the ones they love. If two people really love each other, nothing can keep them apart."
"Sadness can find you anywhere, anytime, so you better have fun when you can."
"Sadness is just another word for not enough coffee."
"Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative."
"Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse."
"Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death."
