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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.

Random quote on Sadness

Most quoted on sadness:

I had not so much of man in me,
And all my mother came into my eyes,
And gave me up to tears.

William Shakespeare Henry V (1599)

I have, as when the sun doth light a storm,
Buried this sigh in wrinkle of a smile:
But sorrow, that is couch'd in seeming gladness,
Is like that mirth fate turns to sudden sadness.

William Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (1602)

A happier lot were mine,
If I must lose thee, to go down to earth,
For I shall have no hope when thou art gone,—
Nothing but sorrow. Father have I none,
And no dear mother.

Homer

So joys remembered without wish or will
Sharpen the keenest edge of present ill.

William Wordsworth

I did not think to shed a tear
In all my miseries; but thou hast forc'd me,
Out of thy honest truth, to play the woman.

William Shakespeare Henry VIII (1613)

Smit with exceeding sorrow unto Death.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

how many ears must one man have/Before he can hear people cry?/The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

Bob Dylan

Thanks to globalization, new technologies and social networks, we know that what makes us laugh or saddens us, causes exactly the same reaction on the other side of the world.

Ángel Boligán Interview (2022)

I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Günter Grass

From the very summit of his sorrows, where he had gone to die, Moses, for the first time in his life, caught a view of the land of Canaan. He did not know, as he went over the rocks, torn and weary, how lovely the prospect was from the top. In this world, it frequently happens that when man has reached the place of anguish, God rolls away the mist from his eyes, and the very spot selected as the receptacle of his tears, becomes the place of his highest rapture.

Joel T. Headley The Sacred Mountains (1847)

It is not in the bright, happy day, but only in the solemn night, that other worlds are to be seen shining in their long, long distances. And it is in sorrow — the night of the soul — that we see farthest, and know ourselves natives of infinity, and sons and daughters of the Most High.

William Mountford Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

So often Egypt, Iraq and Syria and other areas in the Holy Land ooze tears.

Pope Francis

I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are a queen, or long have dream'd so, certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.

William Shakespeare Henry VIII (1613)

How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

She was a good deal shock'd; not shock'd at tears,
For women shed and use them at their liking;
But there is something when man's eye appears
Wet, still more disagreeable and striking.

Lord Byron

I am destined to pass through this world, wandering like an invisible meteor. Precisely because I am superior, I will have to empty the entire cup of sorrow and distress with no joy to cheer me. But the harsh intoxication of drinking from the chalice of sorrow is a superb pleasure that only one who tears his soul to shreds by himself, with his own hands, is given to taste.

Bruno Filippi The Rebel’s Dark Laughter: The Writings of Bruno Filippi (1918)

I may cry, ruining my makeup
Wash away all the things you've taken
And I don't care if I don't look pretty
Big girls cry when their hearts are breaking

Sia

O dear, dear Jeanie Morrison,
The thochts o' bygane years
Still fling their shadows ower my path,
And blind my een wi' tears.

William Motherwell

Two aged men, that had been foes for life,
Met by a grave, and wept—and in those tears
They washed away the memory of their strife;
Then wept again the loss of all those years.

Frederick Tennyson

I really believe if, instead of shutting ourselves into our sorrows and keeping all the light of heaven out of our souls, we opened them to receive Him, Christ would so come to us that the season of our deepest grief and anguish would become one of the richest and most precious of our whole lives.

Arthur Kenney Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

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