Quotes and Sayings about Grief
"Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Nature, Life, Calamity, Grief, Humanity, Treatment)
"There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief."
- Aeschylus
(Related: Grief, Joy, Memory, Pain, Present)
"We have been filled with grief as we have witnessed the decline of the North American Church that was once filled with missionary zeal and yet now seems determined to bury itself in a deadly embrace with the spirit of the age."
- Peter Akinola
(Related: Age, Church, American, Grief, Now, Spirit, Zeal)
"To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking."
- Alcaeus
(Related: Drinking, Folly, Grief, Melancholy, Pain, Sense, Thinking)
"During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child."
- Namie Amuro
(Related: Mother, Grief, Nothing)
"I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten."
- Margaret Anderson
(Related: Ideas, Vision, Grief, Struggle)
"When sadness happens in the middle of work, I separate my personal grief from my train of thought."
- Sergio Aragones
(Related: Work, Thought, Grief, Sadness)
"Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague."
- John Armstrong
(Related: Music, Grief, Joy, Pain, Poison)
"It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them."
- Paddy Ashdown
(Related: Change, Fools, Grief, Tragedy, Victims)
"We may not commit a lesser Sin under pretence to avoid a greater, but we may, nay we ought to endure the greatest Pain and Grief rather than commit the least Sin."
- Mary Astell
(Related: Grief, May, Pain, Sin)
"He that is thy friend indeed, he will help thee in thy need: if thou sorrow, he will weep; if you wake, he cannot sleep; thus of every grief in heart he with thee doth bear a part."
- Richard Barnfield
(Related: Heart, Friend, Grief, Help, Sleep, Sorrow, Will)
"Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation."
- Martha Beck
(Related: Anger, Children, Grief, Guilt)
"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
- Wendell Berry
(Related: Peace, Time, Tax, Grace, Grief, Rest, World)
"Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?"
- William Blake
(Related: Grief, Sorrow)
"Touch'd either the Passions of Rage or Grief to a Miracle."
- Barton Booth
(Related: Grief)
"Tearless grief bleeds inwardly."
- Christian Nestell Bovee
(Related: Grief)
"Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates."
- Jean de la Bruyere
(Related: Happiness, Life, Absence, Grief)
"For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Grief, Nothing, Past)
"Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: People, Grief, Wonder)
"He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy."
- Chanakya
(Related: Family, Fear, Grief, Sorrow)
"It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment's grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one's life."
- Chanakya
(Related: Life, Causes, Day, Disgrace, Grief, Loss)
"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty."
- John Cheever
(Related: Beauty, Power, Battle, Grief, Prose, Rain)
"The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others."
- Anton Chekhov
(Related: Fear, Compassion, Grief, Sensations)
"Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
(Related: Friendship, Happiness, Grief, Joy, Misery)
"It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
(Related: Grief, Hair, Sorrow)
"Grief walks upon the heels of pleasure; married in haste, we repent at leisure."
- William Congreve
(Related: Grief, Haste, Leisure, Pleasure)
"One often calms one's grief by recounting it."
- Pierre Corneille
(Related: Grief)
"Pity speaks to grief More sweetly than a band of instruments."
- Barry Cornwall
(Related: Grief, Pity)
"Striving to tell his woes, words would not come; For light cares speak, when mighty griefs are dumb."
- Samuel Daniel
(Related: Dumb, Light, Words)
"Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Life, Grief)
"If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Society, Grief, Man, Right)
"And remember, it's also very funny, because side by side with grief lies joy."
- Fran Drescher
(Related: Funny, Grief, Joy, Lies)
"To rejoice in another's prosperity is to give content to your lot; to mitigate another's grief is to alleviate or dispel your own."
- Tryon Edwards
(Related: Content, Grief, Prosperity)
"Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen."
- Pliny the Elder
(Related: Fear, Grief, Limits, May)
"Grief is the price we pay for love."
- Queen Elizabeth II
(Related: Love, Grief)
"Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage."
- Paul Engle
(Related: Delight, Grief, Words)
"Time takes away the grief of men."
- Desiderius Erasmus
(Related: Men, Time, Grief)
"Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes."
- Euripedes
(Related: Happiness, Life, Children, Disappointment, Grief, Man)
"Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief."
- William Faulkner
(Related: Choice, Grief, Nothing)
"They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings."
- John Ford
(Related: Heart)
"The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Grief, Queen)
"Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Poetry, Politics, Grief)
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
- Robert Fulghum
(Related: Death, Dreams, Imagination, Love, Experience, History, Knowledge, Hope, Cure, Facts, Grief, Laughter, Myth)
"My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling."
- Elizabeth Gaskell
(Related: Heart, Feeling, Grief, Night, Nothing, Sense, Sleep, Waking)
"Few of us will forget the wail of mingled grief, rage and horror which rose from the camp when the Indians returned to it and recognized their slaughtered warriors, women, and children."
- John Gibbon
(Related: Women, Children, Forget, Grief, Horror, Wail, Will)
"The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom."
- Khalil Gibran
(Related: God, Knowledge, Grief)
"Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain."
- Anne Grant
(Related: Feeling, Grief, Loss, Pain)
"Grief is a process, not a state."
- Anne Grant
(Related: Grief, State)
"Grief is perhaps an unknown territory for you. You might feel both helpless and hopeless without a sense of a "map" for the journey. Confusion is the hallmark of a transition. To rebuild both your inner and outer world is a major project."
- Anne Grant
(Related: Confusion, Grief, Journey, Project, Sense, World)
"ABBA: The Movie; I got a lot of grief for working on that."
- Lasse Hallstrom
(Related: Grief)
"All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward."
- Johann G. Hamann
(Related: Wisdom, Grief, Reward)
"My heart is so light that it's amazing. I get to play all this grief, all this loss, all this disaster and chaos. It's hysterically funny. I am very light."
- Linda Hamilton
(Related: Funny, Heart, Chaos, Disaster, Grief, Light, Loss, Play)
"Whoever happens to give birth to mischievous children lives always with unending grief in his spirit and heart."
- Hesiod
(Related: Heart, Children, Grief, Spirit)
"For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible."
- Dustin Hoffman
(Related: American, Country, Events, Grief)
"If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself."
- Horace
(Related: First, Grief)
"Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death."
- Dean Inge
(Related: Death, Love, Friends, Grief, World)
"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Love, Power, Deep, Grief, Tears, Weakness)
"Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Grief)
"Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions."
- Stefan Kanfer
(Related: Life, Grief, Loss, Possessions)
"Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys."
- Alphonse de Lamartine
(Related: Happiness, Grief)
"There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness."
- Nigella Lawson
(Related: Grief, Madness)
"You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be."
- Nigella Lawson
(Related: Time, Grief, Will)
"I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Grief, Writer)
"The only cure for grief is action."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Action, Cure, Grief)
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
- C. S. Lewis
(Related: Fear, Grief)
"Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief."
- C. S. Lewis
(Related: Day, Fact, Grief, Living, Misery, Shadow, Thinking)
"Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
(Related: Burden, Grief)
"There is no grief like the grief that does not speak."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Related: Grief)
"Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how."
- James Russell Lowell
(Related: Grief, Joy)
"Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events."
- Thomas Lynch
(Related: Death, Love, Sex, Events, Grief)
"Politicians... talk in generalities and lies, and I think they've caused all our grief. They're so awful, they're really funny. I hate thinking this because my dad loved politics."
- Paul Lynde
(Related: Dad, Politics, Funny, Grief, Hate, Lies, Politicians, Talk, Thinking)
"The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous."
- Niccolo Machiavelli
(Related: Act, Fact, Grief, Man)
"When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart."
- Horace Mann
(Related: Heart, Fear, Grief, Needs, Punishment, Repentance, Tears)
"Grief is only the memory of widowed affections."
- James Martineau
(Related: Grief, Memory)
"Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness."
- Herman Melville
(Related: Grief, Idleness, Man, Sin)
"If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble."
- Moliere
(Related: Grief)
"Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain."
- Christopher Morley
(Related: Beauty, Grief, Lonely, Mind, Pain, Shadow)
"I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say: September 11th we are all Americans - in grief, as in defiance."
- Benjamin Netanyahu
(Related: Americans, Defiance, Grief, Nation)
"The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares."
- Henri Nouwen
(Related: Friend, Bereavement, Confusion, Despair, Grief, Healing)
"Grief, and an estate, is joy understood."
- Gregory Nunn
(Related: Grief, Joy)
"What is deservedly suffered must be borne with calmness, but when the pain is unmerited, the grief is resistless."
- Ovid
(Related: Grief, Pain)
"Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength."
- Ovid
(Related: Strength, Grief)
"After an eternity of seeking the sudden threshold of seeing and finding leaves one filled with a strange paradox of ecstasy and grief. I was born to see."
- Joy Page
(Related: Ecstasy, Eternity, Grief, Paradox)
"Grief causes suffering and disease."
- Daniel D. Palmer
(Related: Causes, Disease, Grief, Suffering)
"Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Change, Time, Quarrels)
"They which have no hope of a life to come, may extend their griefs for the loss of this, and equal the days of their mourning with the years of the life of man."
- John Pearson
(Related: Life, Hope, Loss, Man, May, Mourning, Years)
"Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past."
- Walker Percy
(Related: Grief, Loss, Past)
"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
- Marcel Proust
(Related: Happiness, Body, Grief, Mind)
"They have - they do still hit me occasionally, and it's an overwhelming grief for what - even though my life is so good now, even including going through treatment for cancer, my life is incredible."
- Lynn Redgrave
(Related: Life, Cancer, Grief, Now, Treatment)
"Grief changes shape, but it never ends."
- Keanu Reeves
(Related: Grief)
"My work has typically been about finding a means to express memory and commemoration for loss and grief."
- John Regan
(Related: Work, Grief, Loss, Memory)
"Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief."
- Franz Schubert
(Related: Hope, Bed, Grief, May, Night)
"No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by."
- Franz Schubert
(Related: People, Grief, Joy, Reality)
"The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Related: Men, Company, Grief)
"Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Related: Grief, Nothing)
"Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Related: End, Grief)
"Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die."
- Karl Shapiro
(Related: Heart, Eyes, Grief, Laughter, Man, Tears, Wind)
"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart."
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(Related: Death, Heart, Affection, Echo, Grief, Now, Words)
"Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future."
- Sivananda
(Related: Depression, Future, Grief, Mind, Mistakes, Past, Regret, Will)
"I felt I couldn't be a good mom anymore, but I didn't want my children to grow up without a mom. I felt I had to end our lives to protect us from any grief or harm."
- Susan Smith
(Related: Mom, Children, End, Grief, Harm, Want)
"The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island."
- John Millington Synge
(Related: Death, Complaint, Grief, Woman, Years)
"To touch a sore is to renew one's grief."
- Terence
(Related: Grief)
"If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it."
- Emma Thompson
(Related: Age, Heart, Grief)
"Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?"
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Body, Grief, Man, Shadow, Spirit, Sun, Will)
"Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Care, Grief, Joy, Value)
"Tears are the silent language of grief."
- Voltaire
(Related: Grief, Language, Tears)
"The hopeless grief of those poor colored people affected me more than almost anything else."
- Gideon Welles
(Related: People, Grief, Poor)
"Grief is like a moving river, so that's what I mean by it's always changing. It's a strange thing to say because I'm at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It's just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone."
- Michelle Williams
(Related: Time, Heart, Grief)
"This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness."
- Isaac Mayer Wise
(Related: Soul, Thoughts, Darkness, Despair, Grief, Mind, Sorrow)
"By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief."
- John Woolman
(Related: Time, People, Countries, Grief, Numbers, Poverty, Waste)
"Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not."
- Xenophon
(Related: Excess, Grief, Injury, Living, Madness)
"When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was beyond grief."
- Paula Yates
(Related: Grief)