Then fresh tears
Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew
Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd.
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.
The big round tears run down his dappled face;
He groans in anguish.
Past sorrows, let us moderately lament them;
For those to come, seek wisely to prevent them.
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measur'd by his worth, for then
It hath no end.
Joy, being altogether wanting,
It doth remember me the more of sorrow.
Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours,
Makes the night morning, and the noon-tide night.
Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen,
And each hour's joy wrecked with a week of teen.
If sorrow can admit society,
Tell o'er your woes again by viewing mine.
We Japanese and other Asian people have our own special kind of sorrow.
I cannot weep; for all my body's moisture
Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart.
What I should say
My tears gainsay; for every word I speak,
Ye see, I drink the water of mine eyes.