Sorrow quotes
1.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside sorrow — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere."
"Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own."
"What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed."
"There was a sentence in your letter that struck me, “I wish I were far away from everything, I am the cause of all, and bring only sorrow to everybody, I alone have brought all this misery on myself and others.” These words struck me because that same feeling, just the same, not more nor less, is also on my conscience."
"Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial."
"Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think."
"There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow."
"The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment."
"But though it cannot be reasonable not to gain happiness for fear of losing it, yet it must be confessed, that in proportion to the pleasure of possession, will be for some time our sorrow for the loss."
"It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?"
"Never wedding, ever wooing, Still a lovelorn heart pursuing, Read you not the wrong you're doing In my cheek's pale hue? All my life with sorrow strewing; Wed or cease to woo."
"Repentance out of mere fear is really sorrow for the consequences of sin, sorrow over the danger of sin — it bends the will away from sin, but the heart still clings. But repentance out of conviction over mercy is really sorrow over sin, sorrow over the grievousness of sin — it melts the heart away from sin. It makes the sin itself disgusting to us, so it loses its attractive power over us. We say, ‘this disgusting thing is an affront to the one who died for me. I’m continuing to stab him with it!’"
"The happy ending of the Resurrection is so enormous that it swallows up even the sorrow of the Cross."
"No emotion falls into dislike so readily as sorrow."
"Light griefs do speak, while sorrow's tongue is bound."
"He grieves more than is necessary who grieves before any cause for sorrow has arisen."
"Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free."
"To revive sorrow is cruel."
"When people fall in deep distress, their native sense departs."
"Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow."
