Great Throughts Treasury

"The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm." - Horace Bushnell

"Our latest moment is always our supreme moment. Five minutes delay in dinner now is more important that a great sorrow ten years gone." - Samuel Butler

"Sorrow is knowledge; they who know thee most must mourn the deepest over the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of life." -

"Sorrows are our best educators. A man can see further through a tear than a telescope... Grief should be the instructor of the wise: sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge that is not that of life." -

"Every day is a fresh beginning, Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain, and spite of old sorrow, and older sinning, and troubles forecasted, and possible pain, take heart with the day, and begin again." - Susan Coleridge

"In sorrow seek happiness." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"He who can suppress a moment's anger may prevent a day of sorrow." - Tyron Edwards

"Of course, understanding of our fellow-beings is important. But understanding becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feeling in joy and sorrow." - Albert Einstein

"Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one ;unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?" - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"The care of God for us is a great thing, if a man believe it at heart: it plucks the burden of sorrow from him." - Euripedes NULL

"The capacity of sorrow belongs to our grandeur; and the loftiest of our race are those who have had the profoundest grief, because they have had the profoundest sympathies." - Henry Giles

"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!" -

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The busy world sometimes forgets that we need sympathy in our happiness as well as in our sorrow." - Charles Hanford Henderson

"The Kaddish is not a prayer for the dead, but a mandate for the living... It bids man rise above his sorrow... and fixes his view upon the welfare of mankind. It lifts his hope and vision to a day... when mankind shall at last inhabit the earth as children of the one God and Father, and justice reign supreme in peace." - R. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz

"Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?" - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

"Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolutely unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well." - Henry Scott Holland

"Vital is the relation between earthly sorrow and eternal satisfaction. The travail to which God’s saints are subjected results in the birth of nobler natures and more sanctified spirits. Pain always promotes progress, and suffering invariably ensures success." -

"Love is represented as the fulfilling of the law, a creature’s perfection. All other graces, all divine dispensations contribute to this, and are lost in it as in a heaven. It expels the dross of our nature; it overcomes sorrow; it is the full joy of our Lord." - Richard Hooker

"A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty." - David Hume

"To be happy, the temperament must be cheerful and gay, not gloomy and melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy, is real riches; one to fear and sorrow is real poverty." - David Hume

"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

"If we do not know what the sorrow of penitence is, we have been living only on the surface of life - unmindful of its deep realities, unconscious of its grander glories." - Frederick Dan Huntington

"The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude… The love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul." - Washington Irving

"Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future." -

"Sorrow is the mere ruse of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it." -

"The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow." -

"There is no wisdom in useless and hopeful sorrow; but there is something in it so like virtue that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved, nor will by me, at least, be thought worthy of esteem." -

"There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow." -

"To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them. All sorrow that lasts longer than its cause is morbid, and should be shaken off as an attack of melancholy, as the forerunner of a greater evil than poverty or pain." -

"This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks." -

"The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the funeral rite." -

"Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good; and we are then possessed of any good, when we have it so in our power that we can use it when we please... Sorrow is uneasiness in the mind, upon the thought of a good lost, which might have been enjoyed longer; or the sense of a present evil." - John Locke

"Repentance is a hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, and is a sincere resolution and endeavor, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. It does not consist in one single act of sorrow, but in doing works meet for repentance; in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ for the remainder of our lives." - John Locke

"Silence is sorrow's best food." - James Russell Lowell

"And in the end, through the long ages of our quest for light, it will be found that truth is still mightier than the sword. For out of the welter of human carnage and human sorrow and human weal the indestructible thing that will always live is a sound idea." - Douglas MacArthur

"Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts." - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

"What man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life!" - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

"O ye princes and rulers, how exceeding strong is wine! It causeth all men to err that drink it; it maketh the mind of the king and the beggar to be all one, of the bondsman and the freeman, of the poor man and of the rich; it turneth also every thought into jollity and mirth, so that a man remembereth neither sorrow nor debt; it changeth and elevateth the spirits and enliventh the heavy hearts of the miserable; it maketh a man forget his brethren, and draw his sword against his best friends." - Masonic Manual NULL

"Sorrow is the tranquillity remembered in emotion." -

"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

"Do not look at life’s long sorrow; see how small each moment’s pain." - Adelaide Anne Procter

"A small sorrow distracts, a great one makes us collected; as a bell loses its clear tone when slightly cracked, and recovers it if the fissure is enlarged." -

"We do not marvel at the sunrise of a joy, only at its sunset! Then, on the other hand, we are amazed at the commencement of a sorrow-storm; but that it should go off in gentle showers, we think quite natural." -

"Brief is sorrow, and endless is joy." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Whatever lives, lives to die in sorrow. We engage our hearts, and grasp after the things of this world, only to undergo the pang of losing them." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Not to sorrow freely is never to open the bosom to the sweets of the sunshine." - William Gilmore Simms

"Faith, love and sorrow are three elements that mysteriously blend in human experience, each having its own tale to tell of the relation which we bear to the Supreme Being." - O. J. Simon

"Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause, and hatred is nothing but sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause..." -