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 a tear bedims the eye
That time and patience will not dry.
Listen, dying one! There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.
Weep on! and as thy sorrows flow,
I 'll taste the luxury of woe.
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread.
There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes,
And clamour moisten'd.
I so lively acted with my tears
That my poor mistress, moved therewithal,
Wept bitterly.
Here I and sorrows sit:
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.