George MacDonald Quotes

Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

One does not always know how to express the sorrow of the soul. One does not always know how to silence the joy of the heart.

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.

As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.

The last excessive feelings of delight are always grave.

Sweetest smile is made saddest tear-drop!

Joy surfeited turns to sorrow.

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

I shall not let a sorrow die Until I find the heart of it, Nor let a wordless joy go by Until it talks to me a bit.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Love is the root of all joy and sorrow.

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

The ground of all great thoughts is sadness.

To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.

Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!

Each substance of a grief has twenty shadows.

Happiness was born a twin.

I love that feeling of when it's touching and it makes you happy but there's a melancholy or bittersweet glaze to it.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe.

There's nothing in this world can make me joy.

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.