quotations and passages on sadness

Sorrows remembered
sweeten present joy.

Robert Pollok

Instead of allowing yourself to be so unhappy, just let your love grow
as God wants it to grow; just seek goodness in others, love more persons more;
love them more impersonally, more unselfishly, without thought of return.
The return, never fear, will take care of itself.

Henry Drummond

What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.

Jewish proverb

Sorrow is better than laughter:
for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.

Ecclesiastes 7:3

Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out.
When the great oak is straining in the wind,
The boughs drink in new beauty and the trunk
Sends down a deeper root on the windward side.
Only the soul that knows mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come
To stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.

Edwin Markham

A mountain or river is always there, waiting to be seen. But if you're not holding your
experience in your awareness, its power is not available to you. We are easily caught up
in emotional storms that cloud the heart and harm ourselves and others without
our really knowing what we're doing or seeing things as they are. Part of our soul
work is to honor the pain and grief we all carry and not to think it is a door to
someplace else. It's a doorway to right here, right now, this moment. Suffering
is part of the human condition. It needs to be held in the same way
that joy and uplift need to be held--wakefully, as a mature adult.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

The soul would have
no rainbow
had the eye no tears.

John Vance Cheney

Joys are our wings,
sorrows our spurs.

Jean Paul Richter

I've gone through more pain in the last four years than I ever thought possible:
my son died, my family became shattered. I had to begin again, one more
time, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. But I've also learned more about life and
my soul and heart than I ever dreamed possible. In doing so, I've discovered
the most ancient message of all: even when people tell you there isn't any
hope, there is. There is always hope, purpose, and a new magical lesson.

Melody Beattie

Francis Thompson

Grief is a matter of relativity; the sorrow should be estimated
by its proportion to the sorrower; a gash is as painful
to one as an amputation to another.

Depression has played a major role in my life. In some ways, I wish that I had never had to go through it, but in others, I know that my life is richer because of the time that I've spent deep in pain. Winston Churchill called it a big black dog that sat in the corner, watching him all the time; to me, it was more like a fog that every once in a while would roll in over me, blocking my view of everything bright and beautiful. I felt horrible that the people who knew me thought it was something I could control, something I was doing by choice--never would I be so masochistic as to put myself through that kind of anguish.

But the most important thing about depression was that it passed. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but it always passed. And because of it, I have some gifts that I know will serve me my whole life long: I have compassion, for I've been through horrible emotional pain; I have a great appreciation for feeling good and looking for all the positive aspects of life; I have insight, for the depression drew me deep, deep inside myself to places where I never would have chosen to go; I have joy, for the greatest joys come when I compare the times when I'm feeling good to those terrible feelings I've had before.

Depression is terrible--there's no doubt about that. My depression hurt me, and hurt and even destroyed some of my friendships and relationships. But we've been given a great deal of strength and resilience, and we always have to remember that no matter how dark the night, the sun will always rise. Even on the darkest, stormiest days, we know that the sun is there behind the clouds, and it will come to us once more.

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Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Leo Tolstoy

There are as many nights as days,
and the one is just as long
as the other in the year’s course.
Even a happy life cannot be
without a measure of darkness, and
the word “happiness” would lose
its meaning if it were not balanced
by sadness. It is far better to take
things as they come along
with patience and equanimity.

Carl Gustav Jung

Articles and book excerpts on sadness:

The Rainy Days tom walsh

The excursion is the same when you go looking for
your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

Eudora Welty

The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue it has.

the Talmud

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