Edgar Lee Masters Quotes

I'm attracted to pathos, because life is mostly pathos. I've had a lot of it in my life.

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.

The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.

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

It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start

Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

The three types of misery are the misery of suffering, the misery of change, and pervasive misery.

I love the majesty of human suffering.

O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.

And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine's portion - to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night's rest in the course of the next three months.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

Remorse weeps tears of blood.

God's Heart is especially tender toward the downtrodden and the defeated. He knows your name and He has seen every tear you have shed.

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.

No tears to damn you when jealousy burns.

With the intellect I always have always shall overcome, but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life Oh my God! shall the life never be sweet!

It was only when the salt water of my tears ran into my cuts and made them sting that I discovered I was crying.

I know a lot about women and their suffering, but I still know almost nothing about men.

For trash and toys, And grief-engend'ring joys, What torment seems too sharp for flesh and blood; What bitter pills, Compos'd of real ills, Men swallow down to purchase one false good!

More grievous than tears is the sight of them.