Life could not be lived wet, whether it be in rain or tears.
Sadness Quotes
Sadness is Shakespeare’s page by a distance, with Byron a long way back and then Tennyson, Keats and Thomas Gray. The sourced lines include Wilde’s from De Profundis (1897), “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground,” and Horace’s from the Ars Poetica, which tells the writer that to make me weep, you yourself must first feel grief. Samuel Johnson is here for something less solemn, a mock-verse about a man who cries over turnips and not over his father’s death.
The one flagged entry is a passage on the sacredness of tears, credited to Washington Irving and marked misattributed.
In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Every joy that some experience is paid for by the sorrow of others.
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.
Sorrow is only one of the lower notes in the oratorio of our blessedness.
Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus.