Sorrow Quotes

They say my verse is sad: no wonder.Its narrow measure spansRue for eternity, and sorrowNot mine, but man'sThis is for all ill-treated fellowsUnborn and unbegot,For them to read when they're in troubleAnd I am not.

~ A.e. Housman

Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chairs, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor - just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe; for, sir, he was a man, and you are but another man; and, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life's great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

I still remember our first meeting, when Albers brought him to my house. On the little carriage which carried him from the station, and which was hardly built with such loads in mind, sat a massive figure who appeared even more enormous by virtue of the thick overcoat he wore. Everything about him had the effect of extraordinary permanence and solidity: the deep bass voice; the tweed jacket, already, at that time, almost habitual; the appetite at dinner; and at night, the truly Cyclopean snoring, loud as a series of buzz saws, which frightened the other guests at my Chiemgau country house out of their peaceful slumbers.

~ Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

The inner man is the periphery of our consciousness. It is also the inner man that takes care of and protects the inner woman for example through putting up creative boundaries. The meeting between a man and a woman on the outer plane creates a relationship. This relationship is not a conflict, but they complement each other. The outer meeting between a man and a woman also creates integration between our own inner male and female sides.

~ Swami Dhyan Giten

I hate her. Merlin laughed, tossing the stick down. Not so. You have forgotten how to love. That's a different sorrow.

~ Catherine Fisher

But I am not allowed to forgetThe taste of the tears of yesterday.

~ Anna Akhmatova

And the pomegranates,/like memories, are bittersweet/as we huddle together,/remembering just how good/life used to be

~ Guadalupe Garcia Mccall

Life and art are nothing but associations of ideas and sorrows that nourish our illusory quest for the Holy Grail of human existence. It’s a mystery!

~ Carl William Brown

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

~ Oscar Wilde

There are many backstabbing friends who in your hard time will ignore you, without to ask something from them. You just are filled with sadness and they don't confide in you anymore. The downside of your hard time is being considered rude, negative, boorish and insistent.

~ Camelia C.

I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!

~ Robin Hobb

Kyoko sniffs, unable to speak. Sometimes saying nothing means most of all.

~ Sandy Fussell

Naturalists tell of a noble race of horses that instinctively open a vein with their teeth, when heated and exhausted by a long course, in order to breathe more freely. I am often tempted to open a vein, to procure for myself everlasting liberty. Cento volte ho impugnato una lama per conficcarmela nel cuore. Si dice di una nobile razza i cavalli,che quando si sentono accaldati e affaticati, si aprono istintivamente una vena, per respirare più liberamente. Spesso anche io vorrei aprirmi una vena che mi desse libertà eterna.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We can cry for years but sometimes gotta smile too.

~ Aberjhani

The only loss is death.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The end came as dusk fell on a gloomy winter day of cold rain.

~ Soheir Khashoggi

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish.Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own....

~ Rohinton Mistry

...every woman has some reason to weep and weeping is sweetest when it is for another's sorrow.

~ Ivo Andrić

Ah, today is not really a good day, but my afterthought suggests it is, since I have had the chance to learn that life cannot be exemplary all the time. It is good to be taken aback once in a while because only then, would I value the state of being nonchalant.

~ Aishah Madadiy

Even our tears of repentance need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb.

~ Jerry Bridges

As all our senses are the inlets of sin, so they are become the inlets of sorrow (99).

~ Richard Baxter

I thought I was over him! So why did my heart still rip? Why did I still feel this sorrow? I got this strange sensation that God was with me. And he was angry. He was very angry--not at me and not at Jack. God was angry at the pain I was going through. I wondered if that was why God hated sin, because of the destruction it caused. For a moment I felt awe for a God who loved me enough to hate the things that hurt me without hating me for causing them.

~ Susan E. Isaacs

Be sure that your praise songs are numbered higher than your sorrowful dirges and your utmost hope, firmer than your woeful regrets. Be positive.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Bitterness and resentment are a bottomless well. They can only be healed by the phenomenon of someone else's sorrow rising to your level of pain... it never happens - save yourself endless hurt.

~ Steve Maraboli

What was it like to lose him? Asked Sorrow. There was a long pause before I responded:It was like hearing every goodbye ever said tome—said all at once.

~ Lang Leav

Free yourself from the poisonous and laborious burden of holding a grudge. When you hold a grudge, you want someone else's sorrow to reflect your level of hurt, but the two rarely meet. Let go… Sometimes, forgiveness is simply a reflection of loving yourself enough to move on.

~ Steve Maraboli

A child's cry touches a father's heart, and our King is the Father of his people. If we can do no more than cry it will bring omnipotence to our aid. A cry is the native language of a spiritually needy soul; it has done with fine phrases and long orations, and it takes to sobs and moans; and so, indeed, it grasps the most potent of all weapons, for heaven always yields to such artillery.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When we tell our stories, the gods hear our sorrows.

~ Cathy Ostlere

I had this dream about you last night. We were still married. I was giving you a haircut, like I always did, being careful to trim around the scar on the back of your head. I’m sorry I sometimes forgot it and left you with a bald spot. And, I’m sorry we didn’t work out. But you look pretty happy on Instagram.

~ Crystal Woods

There Peter was, looking straight into the very eyes of God, walking the Sea of Galilee and then all of the sudden up to his neck in water. Some would argue he lacked the true believing, I say he had enough faith to go it a ways, and when he couldn't go farther Christ fetched him up.What am I saying? I'm saying that the walk to God ain't easy for the best of us. Now some would say, Preacher, if Peter had misdoubts there in the very glory of the Lord, what of us left here that ain't seen the dead raised nor the leper folk healed. All we seen is hard trial and sorrows. I'd not deny it.Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation. But the good Lord knows we need to see at least the hem of the robe of glory, and we do. Ponder a pretty sunset or the dogwoods all ablossom. Every time you see such it's the hem of the robe of glory. Brothers and sister, how do you expect to see what you don't seek?Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we’re there, we’ll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven’s glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They’ll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?

~ Ron Rash

O, the sorrow of us all,to wander the earth in a shell.And looking to the heavens,we lay to rest in hell.The suffering of the innocentin the midst of Jacob’s well.How the miles fled between us,and that distance is still great.Though on the same shore we now sit,in temporal quietude to wait.The moon is our bright witness;it will lead us to the gate.

~ Craig Froman

There are gains for all our losses. There are balms for all our pains. But when youth, the dream departs, it takes something from our hearts, and never comes again.We are stronger and are better, under manhood's sterner reign, but we feel that something sweet, followed youth with flying feet, and will never come again.Something beautiful is vanished, and we sigh for it in vain. We behold it everywhere, on the Earth and in the air, but it never comes again.

~ Karen Heese

Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.

~ Hermann Hesse

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.

~ David Levithan

I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn't change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I've breathed in gratitude and out forgiveness. Sometimes I haven't been able to muster anything beyond the breath itself, my mind forced blank with nothing but the desire to be free of sorrow and rage.

~ Cheryl Strayed

Dust everywhere... and out of that emerged this beautiful boy with the bluest eyes I'd ever seen, holding his hand out to help me to my feet.

~ Marie Lu

He reached out for her hand and she grabbed onto his. “Eena, when you’re ready to talk about it, I’ll be here. That’s what best friends are for.” She let the tears fall. He’d never know they were for him. He’d think they were because of Derian. They held hands silently throughout the night, Ian unaware that this was by far her most tortured nightmare ever. Paradise so close, and yet completely unattainable.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Truly there are different kinds of pain.  But the most agonizing is the pain of regret, for which there is no lasting relief and no remedy.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Beauty was worthIts every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending,As darkness covered the garden that is the earth.

~ Hayden Carruth