Thomas Gray Quotes

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

The common denominator of all my friends is that they're dead.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

I envy the dead.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

The flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read all the books.

There's a sadness about love, a melancholy and a sadness about beauty. It's just part of the human experience of living on this planet.

She was no longer that happy creature who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the lake and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects. The first of those sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth had visited her, and its dimming influence quenched her dearest smiles.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow

...Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing. Beauty grown sad with its eternity Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea. Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait, For God has bid them share an equal fate; And when at last defeated in His wars, They have gone down under the same white stars, We shall no longer hear the little cry Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: "What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?" He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening — I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.

Wherever I look there is nothing but the image of death.

Tomorrow, more's the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.

Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

It's twilight. It’s the safest time of day for us. The easiest time. But also the saddest, in a way...the end of another day, the return of the night. Darkness is so predictable, don’t you think?

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Baby smiled, mother wailed, Earthward while the sweetling sailed; Mother smiled, baby wailed, When to earth came Viola.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.