Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the face the heart is made better.
— Bible
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Some say that happiness is not good for mortals, and they ought to be answered that sorrow is not fit for immortals and is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, and if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.
Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows.
The busy have no time for tears.
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less with baldness.
There is pleasure in calm remembrance of a past sorrow.
And almost everyone when age, disease, or sorrows strike him, inclines to think there is a God, or something very like him.
We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.
The path of sorrow and that path alone, leads to a land where sorrow is unknown.
To fight aloud is very brave, but gallanter, I know, who charge within the bosom, the Cavalry of Woe.
Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
Sorrow makes us children again.
The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.
There is something in sorrow more akin to the course of human affairs than joy.
Sorrow has produced more melody than mirth.
The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.
Only one-fourth of the sorrow in each man's life is caused by outside uncontrollable elements, the rest is self-imposed by failing to analyze and act with calmness.
Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.
Sorrow is the rust of the soul and activity will cleanse and brighten it.
There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic -- if it is pulled out I shall die.
Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.
The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings -- crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.
Sorrow is easy to express and so hard to tell.
Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction into another's woe. Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.
Bear and endure: This sorrow will one day prove to be for your good.
— Ovid
Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.
Cares are often more difficult to throw off than sorrows; the latter die with time, the former grow.
Sorrows are like thunderclouds, in the distance they look black, over our heads scarcely gray.
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
The cure for sorrow is to learn something.
Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.
The deeper the sorrow the less the tongue has it.
A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier times.
Every life has a measure of sorrow, and sometimes this is what awakens us.
With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.