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.
One sorrow never comes but brings an heir,
That may succeed as his inheritor.
To weep with them that weep doth ease some deal;
But sorrow flouted at is double death.
Sorrows humanize our race;
Tears are the showers that fertilize this world.
Hang sorrow! care will kill a cat,
And therefore let ’s be merry.
It is some relief to weep; grief is satisfied and carried off by tears.
Sorrows are like thunderclouds—in the distance they look black, over our heads scarcely gray.
Those things which were hard to bear, are sweet to remember.
My tears are buried in my heart,
Like cave-locked fountains sleeping.
Of all tales 'tis the saddest—and more sad,
Because it makes us smile.
Thrice he assay'd, and, thrice in spite of scorn,
Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth.
The big round tears
Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase.
That instant shut
My woeful self up in a mourning house,
Raining the tears of lamentation.
My plenteous joys,
Wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves
In drops of sorrow.
If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.