Grief - Quotes

All the joys of earth will not assuage our thirst for happiness, while a single grief suffices to shroud life in a sombre veil, and smite it with nothingness at all points. - Madame Swetchine

Compare your griefs with other men's, and they will seem less. - Eliza Cook

Concealed griefs are the most consuming, as secret maladies are the most fatal. - Eliza Cook

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope. - Elizabeth Gilbert

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. - Mevlana Rumi

Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not. - Xenophon

Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone; His own burden in his own way. - Anne Lindbergh

Grief chants, or, if violent or sudden, its utterance is exactly like that of physical pain. - Austin O’Malley

Grief does not change you.... It reveals you. - John Green

Grief drives men to serious reflection, sharpens the understanding and softens the heart. - John Adams

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it. - Arthur Golden

Grief is itself a medicine. - William Cowper

Grief is like a physical pain which must be allowed to subside somewhat on its own before medical treatment is applied. - Plutarch

Grief is like the wake behind a boat. It starts out as a huge wave that follows close behind you and is big enough to swamp and drown you if you suddenly stop moving forward. But if you do keep moving, the big wake will eventually dissipate. And after a long time, the waters of your life get calm again, and that is when the memories of those who have left begin to shine as bright and as enduring as the stars above. - Jimmy Buffett

Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime. - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Grief is real because loss is real. Each grief has its own imprint, as distinctive and as unique as the person we lost. The pain of loss is so intense, so heart-breaking, because in loving we deeply connect with another human being, and grief is the reflection of the connection that has been lost. We think we want to avoid the grief, but really it is the pain of the loss we want to avoid. Grief is the healing process that ultimately brings us comfort in our pain. - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

 

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys. - Alphonse De Lamartine

Grief never ends… but it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness nor a lack of faith. It is the price of love. - Unknown

Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver. - Sophocles 

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. - Joan Didion

Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it. - Daniel Handler

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. - Marcel Proust

If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble. - Moliere

In life, there is not time to grieve long. - T. S. Eliot

In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry, I cry, and when you hurt, I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life. - Nicholas Sparks

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening. - Sue Monk Kidd

Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affliction or grief has humanized the soul. - Frederick William Robertson

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. - C. S. Lewis

Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength. - Ovid

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly. - Christian Nestell Bovee

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind. - William Wordsworth

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow. - Cormac McCarthy

The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves. - Sophocles

The only cure for grief is action. - George Henry Lewes

The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – but the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love. - Hilary Stanton Zunin

There is a kind of indignation excited in us when one likens our grief to his own. The soul is jealous of its experiences, and does not like pride to be humbled by the thought that they are common. For, though we know that the world groans and travails in pain, and has done so for ages, yet a groan heard by our ears is a very different thing from a groan uttered by our mouth. The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead, and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge. - Henry Ward Beecher

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak. - Henry Wordsworth

There is no grief which time does not lessen and soften. - Cicero

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. - Euripides

We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past. - Kristin Armstrong

What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief. - Shakespeare

You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death. - Laurel K. Hamilton