T. S. Eliot Quotes

In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought that the same cause should produce such opposite effects.

Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.

Sometimes I find that in my happy moments I could not believe that I had ever been miserable.

The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

For every laugh, there should be a tear.

Next to the highest peak of happiness, there’s the deepest gap of pain.

You can only recognize your happiness against the background of suffering.

His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.

I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.

My joy is as painful as my pain.

A joy as intense as pain

If you wrap yourself in daffodils I will wrap myself in pain...

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

I think that hurting gives us a way to measure being happy. How can you know one without knowing the other.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

My mood altered and the pain turned to rage.

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice." I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.

Yesterday was glory and joy. Today, a blackened burn everywhere. On the record of my life, these two days will be put down as one

You really think joy is easier to come by than pain? What have you had more of?

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.

The flip side of happiness is suffering.