Top 91 Great Grief Quotes
#1. Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.
Victor Hugo
#2. It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#3. But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.
Sarah Dunant
#4. A person who hasn't grieved a significant loss has unfinished business inside and can cause others great grief as a result.
Henry Cloud
#5. Great grief contains dejection. They discourage existence.
Victor Hugo
#6. Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing when parents make from their children's souls paralytics.
Simon Soloveychik
#7. Great grief makes sacred those upon whom its hand is laid. Joy may elevate, ambition glorify, but sorrow alone can consecrate.
Horace Greeley
#8. Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.
Victor Hugo
#9. She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.
Anne Ursu
#10. In the midst of Our great grief,' announced Alexander III, 'the voice of God bids Us to stand staunchly for government relying on God's design with faith in the truth of autocratic power.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#13. If you want to connect with people who are in distress and great grief and scared, you need to do it in a certain way. I move kind of slow. I talk kind of slow. I let them know that I respect them.
James Nachtwey
#14. What happens when you have great grief in your life is the arteries of that heart begins to spasms down, just literally squeezes down like this because you're feeling the tension of your life and then the heart muscle itself will also begin - to get stressed out.
Mehmet Oz
#15. And while they were in the same place, there came a great mist about them and a darkness, so that they could not know what way they were going, and they heard the noise of a rider coming towards them. 'It would be a great grief to us,' said Conn, 'to be brought away into a strange country.
Lady Augusta Gregory
#16. I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
Michael Ondaatje
#17. We are seeing with great grief that America remains quiet as Turkey struggles against terrorism. Because there were promises given to us, and they need to be kept. If not, we can take care of our own business.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#18. I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.
Rachel Joyce
#19. It's [grief] like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there, and you keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk around it.
Rachel Joyce
#20. One is not allowed a grief for a life never lived. Yet one has buried the fruit of love, and a great deal of hope and many dreams.
Abigail McCarthy
#21. When the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seem saturated with his one great sorrow.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
#22. On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.
Helen Macdonald
#23. But it's a changeable world! When we consider how great our sorrow seem, and how small they are; how we think we shall die of grief, and how quickly we forget, I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and our fickle-heartedness. For, after all, what business has Time to bring us consolation?
William Makepeace Thackeray
#25. Whatever you believe, and however, each of us deals with these events in our lives, one thing is for certain the truism, time is a great healer, is of no consolation at that moment of intense, all-consuming grief.
From GLASS HALF FULL
Sarah Jane Butfield
#26. To those who see the magical surface of things, you are invisible.'
Good grief. Will you still be able to see me?'
He met her eyes in a way that made her shiver pleasantly. 'I see you in a great many ways. It would be hard to blind me in all of them.
Emma Bull
#27. Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
Charles Kingsley
#29. Did that mean she had not cared deeply for any of her husbands? I wondered. Or only that she was a woman of great strength, capable of overcoming grief, not once, but over and over again?
Diana Gabaldon
#30. It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or grief's that may beset us.
Max Beerbohm
#31. Our griefs cannot mar the melody of our praise, we reckon them to be the bass part of our life's song, 'He hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.'
Charles Spurgeon
#32. The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.
Mark Twain
#33. Sloth is the great enemy
the inspirer of cowardice, irresolution, self-pitying grief, and trivial, hairsplitting doubts. Sloth may also be a psychological cause of sickness. It is tempting to relax from our duties, take refuge in ill-health and hide under a nice warm blanket.
Patanjali
#34. People do sometimes change, of course. Habits, allegiances, dreams are all alterable, but only under extraordinary pressure - like great love, fear, grief. More often, people don't change. A girl who never missed a day of work does not suddenly decide to stay home in bed, for no good reason.
Josephine Humphreys
#35. 'The Killing' has a really great combination of qualities: Even though it's very sad and deals with mourning and grief, it's still exciting. It's about real people and it doesn't shy from the painful points of life.
Joel Kinnaman
#37. When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance. And inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy and their understanding.
Helen Keller
#38. Her wounds brought her a great source of power because they lived in the same place as her heart.
Shannon L. Alder
#40. The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.
Rachel Field
#41. I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.
Judith McNaught
#42. Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.
Victor Hugo
#43. There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Aeschylus
#44. For my grief's so great
That no supporter but the huge firm earth
Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.
(Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1)
William Shakespeare
#45. It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#46. When we grieve over someone who has died in Christ, we are sorrowing not for them but for ourselves. Our grief isn't a sign of weak faith, but of great love.
Billy Graham
#47. Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge, To cure this deadly grief.
William Shakespeare
#48. 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
#49. Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.
Anne Carson
#51. By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.
John Woolman
#52. Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.
Elbert Hubbard
#53. ( ... ) nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all.
Thomas Mann
#54. The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.
William Hazlitt
#55. My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#56. Forgiveness: You cannot afford to withhold forgiveness. Nothing will destroy your life more surely, for there is a great hidden grief in the denial of forgiveness. Your heart is so heavy from what you have not forgiven that you bear the offenses of another as if they were your own.
Glenda Green
#57. It is proper to ask for sorrow with Christ in sorrow, anguish with Christ in anguish, tears and deep grief because of the great affliction Christ endures for me.
Saint Ignatius
#58. Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don't let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.
Barbara "Cutie" Cooper
#59. Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#60. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#61. Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#62. Eight hours West sat a man alone on a beach mourning an inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne.
Douglas Adams
#63. For the country was so rejoiced at the death of the giants, and so many of their lost friends had been restored to the nobility and men of wealth, that the gladness surpassed the grief. "Ye have indeed left your lives to your people, my great brothers!
George MacDonald
#64. We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#65. Some grief is so great, it can't be felt; it can only be observed. Or denied.
Sylvain Reynard
#66. The pain is too much, the loss too great. There is no more before, and the after is too devastating. There isn't enough of me left to go on. Grief has stolen too much of me now.
Katherine Owen
#67. And did with sighs their fate deplore,
Since I must shelter them no more;
And if before my joys were such,
In having heard, and seen too much,
My grief must be as great and high,
When all abandoned I shall be,
Doomed to a silent destiny.
Aphra Behn
#68. Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.
Victor Hugo
#70. We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#71. Great sorrows have no leisure to complain:
Least ills vent forth, great griefs within remain.
William Goffe
#72. There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge. It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.
Judith Butler
#73. Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.
Daniel Alarcon
#74. A long while yet will you keep that great mother's grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#75. I have a number of questions. If I had half as many answers, I'd be in great shape.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#76. Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can't bear the world. It has its limits ...
Susan Fletcher
#77. A great mind is above insults, injustice, grief, and raillery, and would be invulnerable were it not open to compassion.
Jean De La Bruyere
#78. With that tender consideration which, in great crises, people who are crushed by grief shew even for the slightest discomfort of others:
"Forgive me for disturbing your sleep," she said to me.
"I was not asleep," I answered as I awoke.
Marcel Proust
#79. Sorrow is not sickness-unless it becomes a permanent state of mental ill-health. The point is there are indeed stages of grief, as all the therapists tell us, but they do not obey some great unseen timetable.
Bel Mooney
#80. Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.
Rhys Ifans
#81. Playing a Disney princess is the most amazing, unbelievable thing and on the other, it's completely terrifying. I would say it's a cocktail of every sort of emotion. Princesses are great role models, they teach you about grief loss and have big hearts.
Lily James
#82. Think how Jesus works what the Father wills. In the wounds of the dying Saviour see the love of the great I AM. Let every thought of Jesus be also connected with the Eternal, ever-blessed God, for It pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#83. There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.
Horace
#84. But every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself.
Seneca.
#85. Great joy doesn't obliterate grief. Both can be encompassed at the same time.
Helen Brown
#86. And I live on, but in grief and self-contempt,
Left here without the light I loved so much,
In a great tempest and with shrouds unkempt.
Petrarch
#87. Whether you deny your wounds or see them clearly, they bring a great source of power because they lived in the same place as your heart.
Shannon L. Alder
#88. I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.)
for:
the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.
Roland Barthes
#89. I was 'led' to read The Shack by Wm Paul Young after the sudden & unexpected death of my fiance', Marina DeAngelo in July of 2012. It helped me as it has millions of people with the trauma and grief associated with the great personal loss of a loved one."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#90. The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
Adrienne Rich
