Sadness Quotes (page 47)
Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?
Blaise Pascal
He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments? negative affections. In this nihilist fin de sicle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness...
Charles Dickens
Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled fingerreached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuousthread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blindamphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its...
Loren Eiseley
If. If your hand came, dead in the dead of night, And touched my forehead, waking me to see. You standing dead there in the dead of night, I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all. I'd greet you with the tenderest hello. And you would smile, though sad. And then you'd go. There would be nothing deathly in your death. For your love always was the laughing sort. That quickened life and would not die with death. And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep -- That loving gaiety would still...
Norman MacCaig