quotations about sorrow
Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.
JOHN WEBSTER
The Duchess of Malfi
Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Jonah's Gourd Vine
A scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.
I carry this in my body, seed
in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.
But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"To Hear the Falling World"
Sorrow turns the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge.
DAVID HANNAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Die Natürliche Tochter
One sorrow never comes but brings an heir,
That may succeed as his inheritor.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Happiness is valued only when sorrow is tasted.
KUNCHACKO BOBAN
"Two decades of Kunchacko Boban", onmanorama, August 9, 2017
Joy may be a miser,
But Sorrow's purse is free.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
Persian Song
There is not unmitigated ill in the sharpest of this world's sorrows;
I touch not the sore of thy guilt; but of human griefs I counsel thee,
Cast off the weakness of regret, and gird thee to redeem thy loss:
Thou has gained, in the furnace of affliction, self-knowledge, patience and humility,
And these be as precious ore, that waiteth the skill of the coiner:
Despise not the blessings of adversity, nor the gain thou hast earned so hardly,
And now thou hast drained the bitter, take heed that thou lose not the sweet.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead, and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Sorrow is never more sorrowful than when it jests at its own misery.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
Men die, but sorrow never dies;
The crowding years divide in vain,
And the wide world is knit with ties
Of common brotherhood in pain.
SUSAN COOLIDGE
The Cradle Tomb in Westminster Abbey
Sorrow's child sits by the river
Sorrow's child hears not the water
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
"Sorrow's Child"
In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to expect it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to Fanny McCullough, December 23, 1862
It is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excresence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Where sorrow lieth buried
The greenest herbage springs.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Afterward"
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain--
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
Neither stop nor start.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Sorrow"
Drownin' your sorrows only irrigates 'em.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's