If you feel suicidal, please have a look at supportive sites like metanoia.org or suicidal.com before acting!
One bitter time of mourning, I remember,
When day, and night, my sad heart did complain,
My life, I said, was one cold, bleak December,
And all its pleasures, were but whited pain...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Blind Sorrow. Shells.
"Alas! they had been friends in youth:
But whispering tongues can poison truth; [...]
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain;"
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel.
I knew it the first of the summer,
I knew it the same at the end,
That you and your love were plighted,
But couldn't you be my friend?
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Platonic.
"Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears, ..."
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Suicide.
Why dost thou shrink from my approach, O Man?
Why dost thou ever flee in fear, and cling
To my false rival, Life? I do but bring
Thee rest and calm. Then wherefore dost thou ban
And curse me? Since the forming of God's plan
I have not hurt or harmed a mortal thing,
I have bestowed sweet balm for every sting,
And peace eternal for earth's stormy span...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Death's Protest.
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe.
I ne'er can love another
As long as life may stand.
No maid the wide world over
Shall hold this heart or hand.
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. Constancy.
Nessum maggior dolore, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.
There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.
-- Dante Alighieri, Inferno.
There is a quake that rips the soul asunder... it is the pain of remembering.
-- Unknown.
Men have feelings too, but who really cares?
-- Unknown.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-- William Butler Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven.
Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it's better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together.
-- Unknown.
Give God thy broken heart, He whole will make it:
Give woman thy whole heart, and she will break it.
-- Edmund Prestwich, The Broken Heart.
The heart was made to be broken.
-- Oscar Wilde.
7:3 Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.
-- Ecclesiastes, 7:3.
Where you used to be,
There is a hole in the world,
Which I find myself constantly
Walking around in the daytime,
And falling in at night.
I miss you like hell.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Ask me why I keep on loving you when it's clear that you don't feel the same way for me... the problem is that as much as I can't force you to love me, I can't force myself to stop loving you.
-- Unknown.
The life of woman is full of woe,
Toiling on and on and on,
With breaking heart, and tearful eyes,
The secret longings that arise,
Which this world never satisfies!
Some more, some less, but of the whole
Not one quite happy, no, not one!
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus.
Just because some people don't cry, doesn't mean they're not suffering.
-- FH.
Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.
-- Christian Nevell Bovee.
5:15 The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
-- Lamentations, 5:15.
5:20 Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? 5:21 Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.5:22 But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.
-- Lamentations, 5:20-5:22.
Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain.
-- Kirk, Star Trek V The Final Frontier.
Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
-- Sybock, Star Trek V The Final Frontier.
Those we hurt the most are often those we love the most.
-- Unknown.
The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder...
-- Unknown.
The soul in sad humility
Still longs for love and sympathy.
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. Human Sympathy.
The souls of women are so small,
That some believe they've none at all;
Or if they have, like cripples, still
They've but one faculty, the will.
-- Samuel Butler. Miscellaneous Thoughts.
There's nothing in this world so sweet as love,
And next to love the sweetest thing is hate.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
13:2 How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?
-- Psalms, 13:2.
The axe soon forgets, but the tree always remembers.
-- Shona Saying.
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
-- Robert Burton.
Your worst humiliation is only someone else's momentary entertainment.
-- Karen Crockett.
It takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.
-- Unknown.
We are never so helplessly unhappy as when we lose love.
-- Sigmund Freud.
If you depend on others to make you happy, you will be endlessly disappointed.
-- Unknown.
There's always going to be people that hurt you so what you have to do is keep trusting and just be more careful about who you trust next time.
-- Unknown.
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
-- Khalil Gibran.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
-- The Borg.
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
-- Thomas Hardy, How Great My Grief.
It takes only a minute to get a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone, but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.
-- Unknown.
If she undervalue me,
What care I how fair she be?
-- Sir Walter Raleigh.
Where does the white go, when the snow melts?
-- Unknown.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.
-- Oscar Wilde, De Profoundis.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn..
Ever since that night I've been on the road
Travelling and trying to forget
That awful night I lost all my friends
I see their faces yet
-- Phil Coulter. Donegal Danny.
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
-- Oscar Wilde.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
-- Neil Gaiman.
It's so curious: one can resist tears and "behave" very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window... or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed... or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
-- Colette.
143:4 Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.
-- Psalms, 143:4.
As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.
-- Sonia Johnson.
And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
-- Khalil Gibran.
Not they who know the awful gibbet's anguish,
Not they who, while sad years go by them, in
The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish,
Do suffer fullest penalty for sin.
'Tis they who walk the highways unsuspected,
Yet with grim fear for ever at their side,
Who hug the corpse of some sin undetected,
A corpse no grave or coffin-lid can hide -
'Tis they who are in their own chambers haunted
By thoughts that like unbidden guests intrude,
And sit down, uninvited and unwanted,
And make a nightmare of the solitude.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Punished.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
-- William Styron. (Darkness Visible).
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
26:38 [...] My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death [...].
-- Matthew, 26:38.
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.
-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
When love is lost, do not bow your head in sadness; instead keep your head up high and gaze into heaven for that is where your broken heart has been sent to heal.
-- Unknown.
Is it the world, or my eyes, that are sadder?
I see not the grace that I used to see
In the meadow-brook whose song was so glad, or
In the boughs of the willow tree.
[...]
When the heart grows weary, all things seem dreary;
When the burden grows heavy, the way seems long.
Thank God for sending kind death as an ending,
Like a grand Amen to a minor song.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Through Dim Eyes.
But what of life whose bitter hungry sea
Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night
Covers the days which never more return?
Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn
We lose too soon, and only find delight
In withered husks of some dead memory.
-- Oscar Wilde, Desespoir.
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
-- Hebrew Proverb.
It is better to break one's heart than to do nothing with it.
-- Margaret Kennedy.
He that shuts love out, in turn shall be shut out from love,
and on her threshold lie, howling in outer darkness.
-- Alfred Tennyson.
It was never love that broke his heart;
It was losing her sympathy that tore him apart.
-- FH.
But there are moments which he calls his own,
Then, never less alone than when alone,
Those whom he loved so long and sees no more,
Loved and still loves - not dead - but gone before,
He gathers round him.
-- Samuel Rogers.
We must endure Life, through whips, through flame, through pain.
Never surrender through Deaths' gate.
For, who knows what the Realm of Death shall contain?
Maybe, it offers a worse fate.'
-- |3l00|)Y ']['w|$t3d.
How apt the world to misconstrue our deeds,
Tho rising from the inmost depths of heart,
With earnest wish some comfort to impart
To some poor soul whom solace sorely needs;...
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman, Mistrust.
A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ.
-- John Steinbeck.
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
-- Toni Morrison.
Ah! when will this long weary day have end,
And lend me leave to come unto my love?
-- Edmund Spenser.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again, I wrote it with a second hand; But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. Vain man, said she that dost in vain assay, A mortal thing so to immortalize.
-- Edmund Spenser.
We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness.
-- Pierre Corneille.
The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.
-- Khalil Gibran.
Pearls are shell's way of coping with pain.
Without suffering, there would be no pearls.
-- FH.
In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.
-- Colette.
My thoughts hold mortal strife,
I do detest my life,
And with lamenting cries,
Peace to my soul to bring,
Oft calls that prince which here doth monarchize;
But he, grim-grinning king,
Who caitiffs scorns and doth the blest surprise,
Late having deck'd with beauty's rose his tomb,
Disdains to crop a weed, and will not come.
-- William Drummond of Hawthornden.
When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.
-- Robertson Davies.
If we deny love that is given to us, if we refuse to give love because we fear pain or loss, then our lives will be empty, our loss greater.
-- Unknown.
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
-- Unknown.
Whatever side I take, I know that I will be blamed.
-- King Louis XIV.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-- Ernest Hemingway.
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
-- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.
As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.
-- John Lancaster Spalding.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant Of Venice.
You found it a game to watch my pain,
Did you pause and think of the scars on my soul?
My heart was bruised, torn and used,
Yet I followed you blindly into a blackening hole.
Love to me was a feeling new and pure,
Emotions unknown consumed my whole heart
You took my love and made it your whore,
Dissected my spirit and ripped it apart
I could see what you were doing to me,
And I hid my eyes, willed myself to be blind.
It was true that I was afraid to be free,
You pulled my soul too fiercely then left me behind.
I loved you for the attention you gave,
I loved so completely, with all of my power.
But I can't stay confined in this lonely cave,
I will break from your clutch, I will no longer cower.
The darkness still rips silently and cruelly within.
It consumes and it corrodes, crawling through this skin.
I've fabricated my life with lies, creating your love.
Something that never existed. A Blackened, broken dove.
Love clawed all truth from my blinded eyes.
Now I can see and now I despise.
Hate seethes inside and will never again be contained.
I give myself to the loathing that courses in these veins.
-- DarkSylph (Breaking Away).
17:7 Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members are as a shadow.
-- Job, 17:7.
Tis not enough that poverty
Should place me 'neath your station,
So you can look below and see
My humbly clad condition...
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. Love's Rebuke.
In the midday sun, a bright light will be barely noticed. Yet in the darkest night, even the smallest light can make an enormous difference.
-- Ralph Marston.
To loose your LOVE is to have a thousand lives and have them all end at once!
-- Unknown.
I've seen your stormy seas and stormy women,
And pity lovers rather more than seamen.
-- George Gordon Lord Byron, Don Juan VI.
9:6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
-- Revelation, 9:6.
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
-- George Eliot.
For the memory of love is sweet,
Though the love itself were in vain.
And what I have lost of pleasure,
Assuage what I find of pain.
-- Lyster.
Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.
-- Alexandre Dumas.
It is not, Dear, because I am alone,
For I am lonelier when the rest are near,
But that my place against your heart has grown
Too dear to dream of when you are not here.
-- Edith Nesbit. The Heart of Sadness.
Although the sky may be full of stars,
My heart is empty without you.
-- Unknown.
I hate myself and I want to die.
-- Curt Cobain.
The years go by so fast!
And one by one our loved ones pass away.
Life, health and hope today
Tomorrow comes grim death's cold bitter blast.
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. Conservatism.
Good deeds never go unpunished.
-- FH.
Every kind action has a not-so-kind reaction.
-- Murphy's Law of Action and Reaction.
The amount of love someone feels for you is inversely proportional to how much you love them.
-- Murphy's Law of Loving.
Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
-- Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Those whose approval you seek the most, give you the least.
-- Murphy's Law of Missing Approval.
If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship.
-- Francois VI. Duc de La Rochefoucauld.
Just as bad press is better than no publicity at all, I'd rather be hated by you, than ignored and forgotten.
-- FH.
A wounded deer leaps highest.
-- Emily Dickinson, A wounded deer leaps highest.
The ocean doesn't want me today,
But I'll come back tomorrow to play.
The riptide is waging
And the life guard's away
But the ocean doesn't want me today
-- Tom Waits.
Sometimes to realize you were well, someone must come along and hurt you.
-- Perry Farrell.
I could do without many things with no hardship... you are not one of them.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant.
Sometimes it's like you're a big pie settin' on the table, and everybody runs up and gets their piece of you. When it's over, the plate's empty.
-- Loretta Lynn.
I would rather have eyes that cannot see; ears that cannot hear; lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love.
-- Robert Tizon.
I could have loved you once And said it
But then you went away And when you came back
Love was a forgotten word, Remember?
-- Marilyn Monroe.
I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumnaization of our lives... the disasterous by-product of the scientific and technical mentality. Nostra culpa. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits.
-- Albert Einstein.
In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love.
-- George Gordon Lord Byron.
The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
-- Frederick the Great.
God has Alzheimer's disease; He's forgotten that we exist.
-- Unknown.
God knows our real needs and is working (not really hard) to meet them.
-- Unknown.
How will it be when one of us alone
Goes on that strange last journey of the soul?
That certain search for an uncertain goal,
That voyage on which no comradeship is known?...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, How Will It Be?.
God loves you and He is going to send you to Hell.
-- Unknown.
God made women. Men evolved from monkeys.
-- Unknown.
My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad.
-- Olive Schreiner.
You can never understand the true value of something until you don't have it anymore.
-- Unknown.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
-- Khalil Gibran.
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
-- George Eliot.
You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb...
-- Thomas Hardy, A Broken Appointment.
What we see is mainly what we look for.
-- Unknown.
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark
And has the nature of infinity.
-- William Wordsworth.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
-- George Santayana.
No one is more profoundly sad as one who laughs too much.
-- Jean Paul.
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long.
If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.
-- Hobbes.
Death is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.
-- Emily Dickinson.
God made wrinkles to show where smiles have been.
-- Unknown.
It's not that the heart grows cold. No, it burns to ash, and the ash grows cold.
-- Joel Welling.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
-- Marcus Aurelius.
Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.
-- Rosa Parks.
Let the dream go. Are there not other dreams
In vastness of clouds hid from thy sight
That yet shall gild with beautiful gold gleams,
And shoot the shadows through and through with light?
What matters one lost vision of the night?
Let the dream go! ...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Let them go.
It's a sad fact of life, that people who professionally preach love and understanding, talking and listening, being good towards each other, are often the ones who would act most fiercely against their own sermons, when they are personally affected by the very same situations their clients are in. How can you then take the professional advice of such people seriously?
-- Farid Hajji. (in "Institutionalized Welfare Considered Harmful")
Just because you're trained for something doesn't mean you're prepared for it.
-- Unknown.
Mourning is not forgetting... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.
-- Margery Allingham.
Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back.
-- George Herbert. ("Love")
You never really know how lucky you are to have someone, until they are gone and you are left with nothing but memories.
-- Unknown.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Deem not the just by Heaven forgot!
Though life its common gifts deny,--
Though, with a crushed and bleeding heart,
And spurned of man, he goes to die!
For God hath marked each sorrowing day,
And numbered every bitter tear,
And heaven's long years of bliss shall pay
For all his children suffer here.
-- Bryant. [Cited in: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin.]
'Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head.
-- Homer, Odyseey, Book XI.
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few stones upon it.
-- Albert Schweitzer.
Death row is a state of mind.
-- Doris Ann Foster.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
-- T.S. Eliot. ("Four Quartets")
Some people are kind, polite, high-spirited, until you try to get into their pews or their favorite church parking lot.
-- Unknown.
Love is painful that is true;
not to love is painful too;
but there is a greater pain:
to love and not be loved again
-- John Fussle.
Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
For well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #131.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
-- Virginia Wolf.
What is to give light must endure burning.
-- Victor Frankl.
The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.
-- Jim Rohn.
1:18 eo quod in multa sapientia multa sit indignatio et qui addit scientiam addat et laborem.
-- Ecclesiastes, 1:18
1:18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
-- Ecclesiastes, 1:18.
One good thing about being wrong is the joy it brings to others.
-- Unknown.
The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
-- Albert Einstein.
The magic of the first love is the ignorance that it can never end.
-- Disraeli.
To perceive is to suffer.
-- Aristotle.
What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?
-- Khalil Gibran.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,
I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I am but made.
The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
-- Chediock Tichborne, My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares.
The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.
-- Mark Twain.
And I look again towards the sky as the raindrops mix with the tears I cry.
-- Unknown.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.
-- Charles Brower.
Perhaps our eyes need to be washed by our tears once in a while, so that we can see Life with a clearer view again.
-- Alex Tan.
Let your tears come. Let them water your soul.
-- Eileen Mayhew.
Hold on, hold on to yourself, for this is gonna hurt like hell.
-- Sarah McLachlan.
He is a hard man who is only just,
and a sad one who is only wise.
-- Voltaire.
Life dies inside a person when there are no others willing to be-friend him. He thus gets filled with emptiness and a non-existent sense of self-worth.
-- Mark R. J. Lavoie.
If your dreams turn to dust... vacuum.
-- Unknown.
When Christ said: "I was hungry and you fed me," he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.
-- Mother Teresa.
I'm just a little bit tired
If you know what I mean
Don't want to be in a crowd
When I can be in a dream.
-- Jim Steinman.
Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
-- Stephen King.
But woman's grief is like a summer storm,
Short as it violent is.
-- Joanna Baillie. Basil V:3.
The instruments of darkness tell us truths...
-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I:3.
Offend her, and she knows not to forgive;
Oblige here, and she'll hate you while you live.
-- Alexander Pope, Moral Essays II:1.
Aid my disillusionment, my friend!
-- Herman Melville.
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
-- Helen Keller.
Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison.
-- Lord Chesterfield.
Thine eyes I love, and they as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torment me with disdain,
Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #132.
One half of the world will never understand the other half, and it doesn't matter which half you're in.
-- Unknown.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
-- Ogden Nash.
Whispers of sorrow
Here today, back tomorrow
Can not be explained
-- Unknown.
Alas! The love of women!
It is known to be a lovely and fearful thing!
-- George Gordon Lord Byron.
Live with it. You live with pleasure, don't you? Why don't you live with suffering completely? Can you live with it in the sense of not escaping from it? What takes place? Watch. The mind is very clear, sharp. It is faced with the fact. The very suffering transformed into passion is enormous. From that arises a mind that can never be hurt. Full stop. That is the secret.
-- Krishnamurti.
Unwearied, and with springing steps elate,
I had conveyed my wealth along the road.
The empty sack proved now a heavier load:
I was borne down beneath its worthless weight.
I stumbled on, and knocked at Death's dark gate.
There was no answer. Stung by sorrow's goad
I forced my way into that grim abode,
And laughed, and flung Life's empty sack to Fate. ...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Suicide.
If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Woman's love is writ in water,
Woman's faith is traced in sand.
-- Sir Robert Aytoun (Ayton) of Kincaldie.
Affection is like bread, unnoticed till we starve, and then we dream of it, and sing of it, and paint it, when every urchin in the street has more than he can eat.
-- Emily Dickinson.
O little feet! that such long years
Must wander on through hopes and fears,
Must ache and bleed beneath your load;
I, nearer to the wayside inn
Where toil shall cease and rest begin,
Am weary, thinking of your road!
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Weariness.
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and so pass judgment, both on themselves and me. I need not say I am not talking of particular individuals. The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me. Nor am I making any demands on life. In all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so imperfect.
-- Oscar Wilde, De Profoundis.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau.
I will always cherish the initial misconception I had about you.
-- Unknown.
O call not me to justify the wrong,
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart,
Wound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue,
Use power with power, and slay me not by art,...
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #139.
Many folks want to serve God, but only as advisers.
-- Unknown.
To those who despair of everything, reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
-- Albert Camus.
But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.
For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
-- William Butler Yeats, Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop.
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.
-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. [...] For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
The essential sadness is to go through life without loving. But it would be almost equally sad to leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you love them.
-- Unknown.
We cannot learn without pain.
-- Aristotle.
Sometimes to realize you were well, someone must come along and hurt you.
-- Perry Farrell.
We enjoy warmth because we have been cold. We appreciate light because we have been in darkness. By the same token, we can experience joy because we have known sadness.
-- David Weatherford.
Last night I drempt somebody loved me: No hope, no harm, just another false alarm.
-- Unknown.
Death is a punishment to some, to others a gift and to many a favour.
-- Seneca.
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
-- Anita Brookner.
And you learn that love, true love,
Always has joys and sorrow, seems ever present,
Yet is never quite the same,
Becoming more than love and less than love,
So difficult to define.
And you learn that through it all,
You really can endure,
That you really are strong,
That you do have value.
-- Unknown.
A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. Today something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.
-- Françoise Sagan.
One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love.
-- Sophocles.
I was as pure as the morning
When I first looked on your face;
I knew I never could reach you
In your high, exalted place...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Her Last Letter.
Self-esteem is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.
-- Alex F. Osborn.
For what is it to die, But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
-- Khalil Gibran.
Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.
-- Albert Schweitzer.
Don't worry about not being loved.
Life doesn't always bring joy and happiness.
It's when you lose the ability to love,
that you should start to panic.
-- FH.
A man listens to his son yelling at his mother. After they finish fighting and make up the man calls his son and says: "Take this hammer and drive this nail into that peice of wood". Afterwards the father tells him to pull out the nail. Than the father said: "When you fight with your mother, you drive a nail through her heart. But look at how when you are forgiven and you take out the nail, the hole stays."
-- Unknown.
Oh, sweet sorrow, the time you borrow, will you be here when I wake up tomorrow?
-- Katherine Wolf.
God made poor woman with no heart,
But gave her skill, and tact, and art,
And so she lives, and plays her part.
We must not blame, but pity her...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Her Love.
One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.
-- Merle Shain.
Dreams die hard and you hold them in your hands long after they've turned to dust.
-- Dragonheart.
Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are.
-- John Dryden.
People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.
-- J. F. Newton.
I never felt true happiness till I met you, but I never felt true sadness till you left me.
-- Unknown.
Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.
-- Seneca.
Even a drop of love can create an ocean of tears!
-- Unknown.
Each departed friend is a magnet that attracts us to the next world.
-- Jean Paul Richter.
Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell: ...
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #071.
The person who completes suicide dies once. Those left behind die a thousand deaths, trying to relive those terrible moments and understand...
-- Unknown. (... but waiting till there are none left behind is heart breaking and soul crushing. -- FH.)
Never commit suicide: you haven't yet suffered enough. Be thankful for the emotional pain you're in. You certainly deserve it, no matter what you've done or failed to do. If you're lucky, your pain may never end; it will be your faithful companion through the rest of your miserable life.
-- FH. (Shattered Hopes)
Since you're feeling like committing suicide, think about this: It is human fate to feel pain. Don't give up the priviledge of suffering so much more than others. A lot of superficial people experience but a glimpse of true pain; but very few are selected to enjoy the full gruesome experience. Being one of them truely makes you special.
-- FH. (Shattered Hopes)
I'll always be grateful to those who willfully or through simple acts of carelessness inflicted emotional abuse on me. They taught me to feel intense pain and experience bottomless desperation... Above all, they proved beyond all doubt, that I was still alife.
-- FH. (A Merciful Execution)
There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
-- Arthur Koestler.
14:10 cor quod novit amaritudinem animae suae in gaudio eius non miscebitur extraneus.
-- Proverbs, 14:10.
14:10 The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.
-- Proverbs, 14:10.
14:10 No one else can know your sadness, and strangers cannot share your joy.
-- Proverbs, 14:10.
Oh, the gladness of their gladness when they're glad,
And the sadness of their sadness when they're sad;
But the gladness of their gladness, and the sadness of their sadness,
Are as nothing to their badness when they're bad.
-- Unknown. (About Women)
Oh, the shrewdness of their shrewdness when they are shrewd,
And the rudeness of their rudeness when they're rude;
But the shrewdness of their shrewdness and the rudeness of their rudeness,
Are as nothing to their goodness when they're good.
-- Unknown.
If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of payments.
-- Unknown.
Bereft and lone, a clod, a stone
I have left my heart behind.
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. I Have Left My Heart Behind.
Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
-- Cynthia Nelms.
To Sorrow,
I bade good-morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
-- John Keats, Endymion.
He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.
-- Yiddish Proverb.
Justice divine has weighed: the doom is clear.
All hope renounce, ye lost, who enter here.
-- Dante Alighieri, The Inferno.
Few things upset you. I'm glad to be one of them.
-- Unknown.
The flames of Hades burning strong, your soul shall never rest!
-- Unknown.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
-- Somerset W. Maugham.
Life is like an onion. You peel it off layer by layer and sometimes you cry.
-- Unknown.
Her court was pure, her life serene;
God gave her peace; her land reposed;
A thousand claims to reverence closed...
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson. ("To the Queen")
Femmina e cosa garrula e fallace:
Vuole e disvuole, e folle uom chi sen fida,
Si tra se volge.
[Women have tongues of craft, and hearts of guile,
They will, they will not; fools that on them trust;
For in their speech is death, hell in their smile.]
-- Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme XIX.
I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.
-- Benito Perez Galdos.
Three women look upon a photograph
Of one who died not very long ago.
The silk-slim woman gives a little laugh
And holds it nearer the electric glow;
The plump one whines, "He always roughed me so!"
But at the comment and the laugh, the third
Stares silent at the wall, with eyes grown strangely blurred.
-- Thomas E. Moore. Three Women.
Pure and complete sorrow is impossible as pure and complete joy.
-- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, XV:1.
The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
-- John Vance Cheney.
So deep lie our sorrows, so deep in our souls!
So heavily, weigh down the fabric of life!
The struggling spirit is vanquished with strife,
Yet onward grief's torrent still merciless rolls ...
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. Sonnet to Sorrow.
For in the face of heartbreak, I look up and realize it is self inflicted.
-- Unknown.
Sometimes I wish I were a kid again; skinned knees are a lot easier to fix than a broken heart.
-- Unknown.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
-- Carl Jung.
38:17 For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me.
-- Psalms, 38:17.
That which was hard to endure is sweet to remember.
-- Unknown.
Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose..."
-- Country Song.
Love is also like a coconut which is good while it is fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what's left tastes bitter.
-- Bertolt Brecht.
So long as there are men there will be wars.
-- Albert Einstein.
There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.
-- Kate Seredy.
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me;
Is't not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be? ...
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #133.
So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgaged to thy will,
My self I'll forfeit, so that other mine,
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still: ...
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #134.
The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson.
Better be alone than in bad company.
-- Thomas Fuller.
Love is like a butterfly, hold it too tight, it'll crush, hold it too loose, it'll fly.
-- Unknown.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one,
Yet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies when love is done.
-- Francis William Bourdillon, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes.
At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.
-- La Bruyère.
Ne l'onde solca, e ne l'arena semina,
E'l vago vento spera in rete acogliere
Chi sue speranze fonda in cor di femina
[He ploughs the waves, sows the sand, and hopes to gather the wind in a net, who places his hopes on the heart of a woman.]
-- Jacopo Sannazaro (Sannazarius), Ecloga Octava.
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. That is true of men as of dogs.
-- Eric Hoffer.
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
-- Goncourt.
The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away.
-- William Butler Yeats.
Love is unconditional, relationships are not.
-- Grant Gudmundson.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I'm sorry for the anguished hearts that break with passion's strain,
But I'm sorrier for the poor starved souls that never knew love's pain,
Who hunger on through barren years not tasting joys they crave,
For sadder far is such a lot than weeping o'er a grave.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Sorry.
How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
-- William Shakespeare, Othello.
Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.
-- Henry Ward Beecher.
We often see further through a tear, than through a telescope.
-- Unknown.
What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.
-- Unknown.
Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
-- Jean de La Fontaine.
Tears are the safety valve of the heart when too much pressure is laid on it.
-- Albert Smith.
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
-- Julius Caesar.
Love is the distance between reality and pain.
-- Robyn Hitchcock.
I don't know what you are talking about and I don't care.
I'm talking about watching my lover die.
-- Unknown.
27:5 melior est manifesta correptio quam amor absconditus.
-- Proverbs, 27:5.
27:5 Open rebuke is better than secret love.
-- Proverbs, 27:5.
Why do they call the angel of death an angel, if all it does is bring pain and suffering?
-- Unknown.
People don't fall in love with what's right in front of them. People want the dream -- what they can't have. The more unattainable, the more attractive.
-- Xander Harris.
The essential sadness is to go through life without loving.
But it would be almost equally sad to leave this world
Without ever telling those you loved that you love them.
-- Unknown.
I don't accept the maxim 'there's no gain without pain', physical or emotional. I believe it is possible to develop and grow with joy rather than grief. However, when the pain comes my way, I try to get the most growth out of it.
-- Alexa McLaughlin.
Have a good cry, wash out your heart.
If you keep it inside, it'll tear you apart.
-- Unknown.
Life is much like writing in ink : All you can do is read over your past and look forward to a blank page for your future that will soon be filled with words that can never be erased.
-- Gabe Suico.
Time heals old pain, while it creates new ones.
-- Hebrew Proverb.
he who cries the loudest shows the most pain
He who keeps it all inside dies in vain.
-- Blake Baxter. ('When a Thought becomes You')
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
-- Helen Keller.
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
-- Henry Miller.
Your Behavior to me make me feel death is better then this life.
-- Unknown.
For example, justice is considered to mean equality, It does mean equality- but equality for those who are equal, and not for all.
-- Aristotle.
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone.
-- George Gordon Lord Byron, On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixths Year.
The loneliest it gets is when the wind begins to chill and when I sit atop of your old street, the church top brings a stillness to me, there's nothing I would rather do, than have my heart broken by you.
-- Unknown.
It's better to be gone and not forgotten,
Than to be forgotten but not gone.
-- Country Song.
55:21 The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.
-- Psalms 55:21.
Sometimes, God's greatest gifts, are unanswered prayers...
-- Country Song.
God's answers are wiser than our prayers.
-- Unknown.
If you havent all the things you want, be grateful for the things you dont have that you wouldnt want.
-- Unknown.
Soft rain falls gently on my weary eyes,
As if to hide a single tear,
My life will be forever autumn,
Because you're not here.
-- Moody Blues.
I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.
-- Rabindranath Tagore.
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.
-- Henry Maudsley.
A life with love will have some thorns, but a life without love will have no roses.
-- Unknown. (...but you'll still feel the thorns anyway. -- FH.)
Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.
-- David Grayson.
When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed.
-- Jane Fonda.
To fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.
-- Bess Myerson.
One may have a blazing heart in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
-- Vincent Van Gogh.
The tragedy of life is what dies in the hearts and souls of people while they live.
-- Albert Einstein.
Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb.
-- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
-- Arthur Koestler.
You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
-- Unknown.
Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now, ...
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #090.
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
-- Pearl S. Buck.
If only we could teach our minds,
To find pleasure in our own pain.
Weak girls find pleasure in the pain,
That is forced or exhibited by others.
Strong girls find pleasure in their own pain,
And do not seek to hide from fear.
-- Meg Brown.
What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?
-- Euripedes.
To love without expected return on my investment frees me to love with purity of heart, mind and soul... I am not distracted by selfish motive or disappointed by insensitivity.... I am free to love... just love.
-- L. Hodge.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
-- Isaac Asimov.
Sometimes it hurts more then we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we'd know some kind of peace... but we would be hollow... empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we'd be truly dead.
-- Unknown.
Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
No smile is as beautiful as the one that struggles through tears.
-- Unknown.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
-- Henry David Thoreau.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Some day you'll cry for me like I cried for you.
Some day you'll miss me like I missed you.
Some day you'll need me like I needed you.
Some day you'll love me, but I won't love you.
-- Unknown.
The story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
-- Helen Hayes.
Very often melancholy is the memory of a kiss not given.
-- Unknown.
Born to lose, I've lived all my life in vain.
All my dreams have only caused me pain.
All my life I've always been so blue.
Born to lose and now I'm losing you.
-- Bouncing Souls.
There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
-- Erma Bombeck. (I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression)
It hurts to breathe because every breath I take proves I can't live without you.
-- Unknown.
If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.
-- Vaclav Havel.
Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer.
And one false step entirely damns her fame.
In vain with tears the loss she may deplore,
In vain look back on what she was before;
She sets like stars that fall, to rise no more.
-- Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore I.
I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer (upon witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb)
The greatest pain that comes from love is loving someone you can never have.
-- Unknown.
My downcast eyes
My empty soul
My hollow heart
My shivering form
Is nothing to you
You just don't care
And when I die
Nothing would stop
No one would sob
No one would sigh
-- Karen Ang.
You can never lose what you never had.
-- Dican.
The truth will set you free... but first, it will make you miserable.
-- Unknown.
Slipping away are the hopes that made
Bliss out of sorrow, and sun out of shade,
Slipping away is our hold on life;
And out of the struggle and wearing strife, ...
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Slipping Away.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of dove,
A maid whom there was none to praise
And very few to love: ...
-- William Wordsworth, She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways.
It takes two to speak the truth... one to speak and another to hear.
-- Henry David Thoreau.
God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.
-- Elbert Hubbard.
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
-- Walt Whitman.
And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
-- Khalil Gibran.
The stupiest mistake in life is thinking the one who hurt you the most, won't hurt you again.
-- Unknown.
The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them knowing you can't have them.
-- Unknown.
53:3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
-- Isaiah, 53:3.
Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
-- Edmund Burke.
Where is the fine line of sanity's seduction,
Does it sleep by society's code of normalcy?
Depression is my one loyal friend,
Through the years, down in the fears,
Griping at my ambivalence to the end.
I hurt myself, my skin on the outside,
In attempts to kill that thing on the inside.
Seeing death is more than a brink of insanity,
It's deep, dismal prison in which to hide,
It makes dreaming about death like ice cream.
We are not crazy, we are our senses amplified.
-- Meg Brown.
You know how people say that if you wish for something hard enough it will come true... Well, I've been wishing for you every night and you still aren't here.
-- Unknown.
Half of the world's misery comes from ignorance. The other half comes from intelligence.
-- Bonar Thompson.
If you want to commit suicide, you can use my razor;
it's electric, but you can hang yourself with the cord.
-- Haythum R. Khalid.
Lasting harmony with a woman (was) an undertaking in which I twice failed rather disgracefully.
-- Albert Einstein.
I can sympathise with people's pains, but not with their pleasures.
There is someting curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
-- Aldous Huxley.
Happiness is a path, not a destination.
-- Unknown. (Sadly, not everyone is a pathfinder. -- FH.)
All our young lives we search for someone to love, someone who makes us complete. We choose partners and change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak and hope, all the while wondering if somewhere and somehow there is someone searching for us.
-- The Wonder Years.
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it's dark.
-- Zen Proverb.
There are too many people, and too few human beings.
-- Robert Zend.
This would be really funny if it weren't happening to me.
-- Unknown.
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
-- Unknown.
You'll know that you miss someone very much when everytime you think of that person, your heart breaks into pieces and just a quick hello from that person can bring the broken pieces back.
-- Unknown.
We cannot learn without pain.
-- Aristotle.
Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine.
This have I known always: Love is no more than the wide blossom which the wind assails, than the great tide that treads the shifting shore, strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales; Pity me that the heart is slow to learn, that the swift mind beholds at every turn.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
-- Arthur C. Clarke.
If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.
-- Ernest Hemingway.
Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave. Our birth is nothing but our death begun.
-- Bishop Hall.
A man should go on living if only to satisfy his curiosity.
-- Jewish Proverb.
Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss and ends with a tear.
-- Unknown.
We often fear being rejected so very much that we reject ourselves first before anyone else has the chance.
-- Unknown.
Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
-- May Sarton.
In the aftermath of betrayal, we often have to struggle to maintain our grip on reality. Survival requires a source of self-respect, self-awareness, and self-honesty. We have to find a balance point before reaching out again.
-- Unknown.
When the shadows of the night
Come floating 'round my open door,
I ofttimes think of the departed,
Those who have gone to the other shore.
When the sound of rustling robes
Falls gently on my ear;
And light comes streaming through the darkness,
Down from the celestial atmosphere.
And those I loved so dearly
Come flitting through the gloom,
To trim the burning taper
Dimly burning at the tomb.
Then the voices of the night
Mingle with the flow of time,
In a sort of solemn cadence,
Like the ghastly mariner's rhyme.
And the whisperings of Death
Create a feverish chill,
Rising from the meadow
Over the woodland and the hill.
Then I seem to catch the sound
Of some silvery chiming bell,
Floating through the darkness
From lands where fleshless mortals dwell,
And I hear the dashing wave
Break on the nearing strand;
As I wander onward
To the fair, appointed land.
In my imagination, then,
I hear the grating keel
Of Charon's boat, as he helps on board
His human cargo, with hand of steel.
-- John Preston Canpell (The Shadows of the Night).
A word is dead when it is said, some say.
I say it just begins to live that day.
-- Emily Dickinson, A word is dead.
It's not missing you that's the hardest part, it's knowing I once had you that breaks my heart.
-- Unknown.
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
-- Socrates.
Trust is like money; you spend it, you save it, you lend it, and sometimes you get robbed.
-- Unknown.
So long as man remains free, he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
-- Unknown.
Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life.
-- Emile Durkheim.
Few things are as painful as the truth realized too late.
-- Unknown.
They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice, that suicide is wrong, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer.
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.
-- Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi.
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
-- Unknown.
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 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
-- Carl Jung.
Sorrow, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow...
-- Charles Algernon Swinburne, Sorrow.
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
-- Jack Lemmon.
Mom, romance is dead. It was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.
-- Lisa Simpson.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.
-- George Gordon Lord Byron, When We Two Parted.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Solitude.
55:5 Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.
-- Psalms, 55:5.
So we bear our heart's deep sorrow.
While we bid our friend adieu.
Hopes and prayers for her to-morrow,
All our inmost thoughts imbue.
-- Colfax Burgoyne Harman. Our Friend, Adieu.
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself on an impossible aim.
-- Graham Henry Greene.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
-- Unknown.
Saying nothing... sometimes says the most.
-- Emily Dickinson.
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?
-- Richard Dawkins.
Telling the truth and making someone cry is just as bad as telling a lie and making someone smile!
-- Unknown.
Tired with all these for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn, ...
-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet #066.
If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well.
-- Joyce Grenfell.
Real tears are not those that fall from the eyes and cover the face, but those that fall from the heart and cover the soul.
-- Unknown.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell.
I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.
-- Louise Nevelson.
Take them, O Death! and bear away
Whatever thou canst call thine own!
Thine image, stamped upon this clay,
Doth give thee that, but that alone! ...
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Suspiria.
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day? ...
-- Oscar Wilde, Apologia.
She rose up in the early dawn,
And white and silently she moved
About the house. Four men had gone
To battle for the land they loved,
And she, the mother and the wife,
Waited for tidings from the strife.
How still the house seemed! and her tread
Was like the footsteps of the dead.
The long day passed, the dark night came;
She had not seen a human face.
Some voice spoke suddenly her name.
How loud it echoed in that place
Where, day by day, no sound was heard
But her own footsteps! "Bring you word,"
She cried to whom she could not see,
"Word from the battle-plain to me?"
A soldier entered at the door,
And stood within the dim firelight:
"I bring you tidings of the four,"
He said, "who left you for the fight."
"God bless you, friend," she cried; "speak on!
For I can bear it. One is gone?"
"Ay, one is gone!" he said. "Which one?"
"Dear lady, he, your eldest son."
A deathly pallor shot across
Her withered face; she did not weep.
She said: "It is a grievous loss,
But God gives His beloved sleep.
What of the living--of the three?
And when can they come back to me?"
The soldier turned away his head:
"Lady, your husband, too, is dead."
She put her hand upon her brow;
A wild, sharp pain was in her eyes.
"My husband! Oh, God, help me now!"
The soldier heard her shuddering sighs.
The task was harder than he thought.
"Your youngest son, dear madam, fought
Close at his father's side; both fell
Dead, by the bursting of a shell."
She moved her lips and seemed to moan.
Her face had paled to ashen grey:
"Then one is left me--one alone,"
She said, "of four who marched away.
Oh, overruling, All-wise God,
How can I pass beneath Thy rod!"
The soldier walked across the floor,
Paused at the window, at the door,
Wiped the cold dew-drops from his cheek
And sought the mourner's side again.
"Once more, dear lady, I must speak:
Your last remaining son was slain
Just at the closing of the fight;
Twas he who sent me here to-night."
"God knows," the man said afterward,
"The fight itself was not so hard."
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Messenger.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more." ...
-- Edgar Allen Poe. The Raven.
If you feel suicidal, please have a look at supportive sites like metanoia.org or suicidal.com before acting!
