Seek not to know what must not be reveal, for joy only flows where fate is most concealed. A busy person would find their sorrows much more; if future fortunes were known before!
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.
Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulations, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
Grief is the price we pay for love.
Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.
I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.
Sorrows are our best educator. A man can see further through a tear than a telescope.
I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
Sorrow and suffering make for character if they are voluntarily borne, but not if they are imposed.
Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.
Parting is such sweet sorrow
After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
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.
To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.
A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.
Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.
there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late
In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.
A people whose souls are so little tuned to joy.
To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.
