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.
Never fear to weep;
For tears are summer showers to the soul,
To keep it fresh and green.
Oh would I were dead now,
Or up in my bed now,
To cover my head now,
And have a good cry!
In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.
Tears are due to human misery, and human sufferings touch the mind.
Melancholy
Is not, as you conceive, indisposition
Of body, but the mind's disease.
Heaven is not gone, but we are blind with tears,
Groping our way along the downward slope of Years!