Quotes about grief

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

— John Berger

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comet in the morning. [Psalms 30:5]

— Bible

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.

— Jean De La Bruyere

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

— William S. Burroughs

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

— Antonia S. Byatt

No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.

— E. M. Cioran

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

— Cyril Connolly

One often calms one's grief by recounting it.

— Pierre Corneille

Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

— Benjamin Disraeli

When the heart grieves over what is has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.

— Sufi Epigram

Time takes away the grief of men.

— Desiderius Erasmus

In all the silent manliness of grief.

— Oliver Goldsmith

In private grief with careless scorn. In public seem to triumph and not to mourn.

— Grannville

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

— Samuel Johnson

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

— Samuel Johnson

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

— Alphonse De Lamartine

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

— C. S. Lewis

The only cure for grief is action.

— George Henry Lewis

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Well has it been said that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is not grief that does not speak.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sorrow is the great idealizer.

— James Russell Lowell

Our trials, our sorrows, and our grieves develop us...

— Orison Swett Marden

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.

— James Martineau

Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.

— Golda Meir

No matter how deep and dark your pit, how dank your shroud, their heads are heroically unbloody and unbowed.

— Ogden Nash

Grief, and an estate, is joy understood,

— Gregory Nunn

Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.

— Walker Percy

Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?

— Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Grief is light that is capable of counsel.

— Proverb

Time heals old pain, while it creates new ones.

— Hebrew Proverb

All things grow with time -- except grief.

— Jewish Proverb

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

— Seneca

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.

— Seneca

Patch grief with proverbs.

— William Shakespeare

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

— Lillian Smith

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. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

— J. M. Synge

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

— Henry David Thoreau

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

— Simone Weil

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

— Rebecca West

The greatest grief in life is to have no choice !

— Mak Kazeronnie

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? Fare you well! Had you such a loss as I, I could give better comfort than you do.

— William Shakespeare

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

— George Eliot