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.
Tell me, ye wingèd winds
That round my pathway roar,
Know ye not some spot
Where mortals weep no more?
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
Day-thoughts feed nightly dreams;
And sorrow tracketh wrong,
As echo follows song.
Accept these grateful tears! for thee they flow,
For thee, that ever felt another's woe!