Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Tears

"Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman." -

"Sooner mayest thou trust thy pocket to a pickpocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew! Only when man weeps he should be alone, not because tars are weak, but they should be secret. Tears are akin to prayer - Pharisees parade prayers, impostors parade tears." -

"The busy have no time for tears." -

"The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life." - William Ellery Channing

"I never saw anything funny that wasn’t terrible. If it causes pain, it’s funny; if it doesn’t, it isn’t. I try to hide the pain with embarrassment, and the more I do that, the better they like it. But that does not mean they are unsympathetic. Oh no, they laugh often with tears in their eyes." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"To bear up under loss; to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; to be victor over anger, to smile when tears are close; to resist disease and evil men and base instincts; to hate hate and to love love; to go on when it would seem good to die; to look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be - that is what any man can do, and be great." - Zane Grey Orig. name Pearl Grey

"What poetry there is in human tears!" - Heinrich Heine

"Hide not thy tears; weep boldly, and be proud to give the flowing virtue manly way; it is nature’s mark to know an honest heart by." - Aaron Hill

"Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power, that is all." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Tears, except as a private demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"There’ll be no night in Heav’n, In that blest world above; No anxious toil, no weary hours; For labor there is love. There’ll be no sorrow there, There’ll be no sorrow there, In Heav’n above, where all is love, There’ll be no sorrow there. There’ll be no grief in Heav’n, For life is one glad day, And tears are those of former things Which all have passed way. There’ll be no sin in Heav’n; Behold that blessèd throng, All holy in their spotless robes, All holy in their song." - Frederick Dan Huntington

"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

"Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears." -

"Nature, in giving tears to man, confessed that he had a tender heart: this is our noblest quality." - Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

"The fool exposes the limitations of human criteria, confronts us anew with the undefined nature of our cosmic existence, leads us backstage to make us aware of the artificiality of our cultural values, and then shows us a world without limit, because it is neither categorized nor ordered in accordance with artificial opposites. The sick jester removes these opposites, tears down external and internal barriers and causes us to tumble head over heels from our tailor-made world of lines and demarcations into a more comprehensive and holistic dimension that has no beginning or end." - Holger Kalweit

"Our conscience is a fire within us, and our sins as the fuel; instead of warming, it will scorch us, unless the fuel be removed, or the heat of it allayed by penitential tears." - James Madison Mason

"Tears of joy are the dew in which the sun of righteousness is mirrored." -

"The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities than shedding tears and feeling anger at sight of the wickedness of man." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Tears are the softening showers which cause the seed of heaven to spring up in the human heart." -

"Pride dries the tears of anger and vexation; humility, those of grief. The one is indignant that we should suffer; the other calms us by the reminder that we deserve nothing else." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

"Prejudices may be intense, but their lives are limited. To discover when they are dead and to bury them, is an important matter, and no unseemly tears should be shed at their funerals... Human nature is so constituted, that all see, and judge better, in the affairs of other men, than in their own." -

"Tears are Summer showers to the soul." - Alfred Austin

"If you trap the moment before it's ripe, the tears of repentance you'll certainly wipe; but if once you let the ripe moment go you can never wipe off the tears of woe." - William Blake

"To some people a tree is something so incredibly beautiful that it brings tears to the eyes. To others it is just a green thing that stands in the way." - William Blake

"To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is, so he sees." - William Blake

"Hide thy tears, I do not bid thee not to shed them, it were easier to stop Euphrates at its source than one tear of a true and tender heart." -

"I feel my immortality o'ersweep all pains, all tears, all time, all fears, and like the eternal thunders of the deep, peal to my ears this truth - "Thou livest forever."" -

"For Beauty's tears are lovelier than her smile." - Thomas Campbell

"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears." - John Vance Cheney

"Tears never yet saved a soul. Hell is full of weepers weeping over lost opportunities, perhaps over the rejection of an offered Saviour. Your Bible does not say, “Weep, and be saved.” It says, “Believe, and be saved.” Faith is better than feeling." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

"They who are sad find somehow sweetness in tears." - Euripedes NULL

"Waste not fresh tears over old griefs." - Euripedes NULL

"Who never ate his bread with tears, who never sat weeping on his bed during care-ridden nights knows you not, your heavenly powers." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Pleasures, riches, honor, and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity, and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. Oh, the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world!" -

"Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it." - Gordon Graham

"More tears are shed in playhouses than in churches." - Thomas Guthrie

"Innocence is a flower which withers when touched, but blooms not again, though watered with tears." - Lucy Hooper True

"Happiness is a thing of gravity. It seeks for hearts of bronze, and carves itself there slowly; pleasure startles it away by tossing flowers to it. Joy's smile is much more close to tears than it is to laughter." - Victor Hugo

"God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness; and laughter is on top of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species." - James Henry Leigh Hunt

"Some tears belong to us because we are unfortunate; others, because we are humane; many because we are mortal. But most are caused by our being unwise. It is these last only that of necessity produce more." - James Henry Leigh Hunt

"In art one arrives at an honorable result only through one's tears. He who does not suffer does not believe." - Jean-Augustine-Dominique Ingres

"It need not discourage us if we are full of doubts. Healthy questions keep faith dynamic. In fact, unless we start with doubts we cannot have a deep-rooted faith. One who believes lightly and unthinkingly has not much of a belief. He who has a faith which is not to be shaken has won it through blood and tears - has worked his way from doubt to truth as one who reaches a clearing through a thicket of brambles and thorns." -

"Music moves us, and we know not why; we feel the tears but cannot trace their source. Is the language of some other state, born of its memory? For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of another world like music?" - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough." - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

"All the rarest hues of human life take radiance and are rainbowed out in tears." - Gerald Massey

"Hypocrites weep, and you cannot tell their tears from those of saints; but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"Tears may soothe the wounds they cannot heal." - Thomas Paine

"The acceptance of truth that joy and sorrow, laughter and tears are not confined to any particular time, place or people, but are universally distributed, should make us more tolerant of and more interested in the lives of others." - William M. Peck

"When Alexander had subdued the world, and wept that none were left to dispute his arms, his tears were an involuntary tribute to a monarchy that he knew not - man’s empire over himself." - Jane Porter

"There are times when God asks nothing of his children except silence, patience, and tears." - Charles Seymour Robinson