Top 81 Quotes About The Mournful
#1. Perfection may be an impossible goal, but habits help us to do better. Making headway toward a good habit, doing better than before, saves us from facing the end of another year with the mournful wish, once again, that we'd done things differently.
Gretchen Rubin
#2. Beyond Stone Ring Keep's high walls, the wind wailed of coming winter. Ariane didn't hear the mournful cry. She heard nothing but echoes
Elizabeth Lowell
#3. Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?
Janet Frame
#4. And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.
Pierre Loti
#5. A pine tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.
It dreameth of a Palm tree
Which far in the East alone,
In the mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.
Heinrich Heine
#6. Death ends our woes, and the kind grave shuts up the mournful scene.
John Dryden
#7. The wailing owl Screams solitary to the mournful moon.
David Mallet
#8. The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as long as possible - to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.
Kurt Vonnegut
#9. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress-trees Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across the mournful marbles play!
John Greenleaf Whittier
#10. In this the seat our Conqueror has given?
And this the climate we must change for heaven?
These Regions and this realm my wars have got
The mournful Empire is the loser's lot.
John Dryden
#11. My opinion of mankind is founded upon the mournful fact that, so far as I can see, they find within themselves the means of believing in a thousand times as much as there is to believe in.
Augustus De Morgan
#13. The way that words mutate reminds me of fashions in music. The word
the note
is a constant. But the setting and chord in which it occurs alters with the mood of a nation from major to minor, from the assertive to the mournful and foreboding.
Neal Ascherson
#14. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel - although he neither saw nor heard - to feel the presence of my head within the room.
Edgar Allan Poe
#15. I thought about that as we waited for the ghouls to pass. I pretended not to see Annabeth wipe a tear from her cheek as she listened to the mournful keening of Cerberus in the distance, longing for his new friend.
Rick Riordan
#16. Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#17. The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force on that morning when we wake to find the mournful words "too late" ringing in our ears.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#18. Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes.
Paul Gauguin
#19. My countrymen, we hold a rich deposit in trust for ourselves and for all our brethren of mankind. It is the fire of liberty. If it becomes extinguished, our darkened land will cast a mournful shadow over the nations. If it lives, its blaze will enlighten and gladden the whole earth.
Francis Scott Key
#20. The problem is, not to find whether the picture is mournful, but whether it is true. And for that we have the testimony of history.
Frederic Bastiat
#21. The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21).
Annie Dillard
#22. Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great junction of spiritual cultures.
David K. Shipler
#23. I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.
Thomas De Quincey
#24. Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.
Charles Dickens
#25. The pathways of hell are hardly foreign; we shall end up there one day if we tarry too long. From a passageway to a pathway: it is an easy fall, without shock or surprises. Every day we are reacquainted with the sadness of the passageway and step by step we clear the path toward our mournful doom.
Muriel Barbery
#26. Now there's us, staking out our piece of cinematic turf (might be small but
it's ours). And the music has to fit the vision as specifically as it did for [Star Wars and The Matrix.] OUR music comes from THEIR music, this scrappled bunch. It is spare, intimate, mournful and indefatigable.
Joss Whedon
#27. Because 'tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis convenient.
Thomas Hardy
#28. It is a mournful fact that most men, and indeed all men of worldly character, have so much regard to public opinion that they dare not act according to the dictates of their consciences when acting thus would incur the popular frown.
Charles Grandison Finney
#29. Besides what endless brawls by wives are bred,
The curtain lecture makes a mournful bed.
Juvenal
#30. Struggling with frozen expressions and tightly compressed lips. Everyone wore black padded jackets in a kind of mournful uniformity, and battled the same bladed wind that swept across the open spaces, their fists jammed into pockets, their heads resolutely down.
Gail Jones
#31. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.
Douglas MacArthur
#32. Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#34. What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?
Ivan Turgenev
#35. Then the Kolokolo Bird said with a mournful cry, Go to the banks of the great, grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.
Rudyard Kipling
#36. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
'It's been fun,' she said.
'Yes,' I said, taking her hand.
She was wearing gloves.
T.C. Boyle
#37. Now get some clothes on before the women around here are driven into a frenzy."
He gave me a mournful look. "I'm afraid that'll happen with or without clothes, my dear.
Richelle Mead
#38. He went in, lean and deadly, and ended the creature with a lightning-fast spike of his blade. It shrieked, likely altering the rest. The death call carried like a mournful song.
Ann Aguirre
#39. Whate'er thy joys, they vanish with the day: Whate'er thy griefs, in sleep they fade away, To sleep! to sleep! Sleep, mournful heart, and let the past be past: Sleep, happy soul, all life will sleep at last.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#40. It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past.
Victor Hugo
#41. Earth is constant only in her inconstancy, but in the heavenly state all mournful change shall be unknown, and with it all fear of storm to wreck our hopes and drown our joys.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#42. A true religious instinct never deprived man of one single joy; mournful faces and a sombre aspect are the conventional affectations of the weak-minded.
Hosea Ballou
#43. Her vice takes hold of her again, but she still refrains until some moment when, gnawed by some hideous caprice, she comes aground like a mournful wreck ruined by lust, in the midst of her own banal, perfidious pollution.
Jean Lorrain
#44. Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling
this is a further effect of our shared sorrow, this empathy, this mournful telepathy.
John Banville
#45. He passed a stall in which five huge men were dancing to the music of a lugubrious hurdy-gurdy being played by a mournful-looking black bear;
Neil Gaiman
#46. I feel a strong immortal hope, which bears my mournful spirit up beneath its mountain load; redeemed from death, and grief, and pain, I soon shall find my [child] again within the arms of God.
Charles Wesley
#47. A man without earnestness is a mournful and perplexing spectacle. But it is a consolation to believe, as we must of such a one, that he is the most effectual and compulsive of all schools.
John Sterling
#48. Ziri's soul felt like the high roaming wind of the Adelphas Mountains and the beat of stormhunters' wings, like the beautiful, mournful, eternal song of the wind flutes that had filled their caves with music he could not possibly remember. It felt like home.
Laini Taylor
#49. Since childhood, since her early school days, New Year's Eve had possessed for her a mournful terror: she had elected it to represent the Nothingness which was her own life, the solid, cheerful festival which had seemed to be the lives of others.
Margaret Drabble
#50. The door is open, but judging from the slow, mournful melody, I don't think he wants to talk.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann
#51. Indeed, one had the impression that even for the sufferers the frantic terror of the early phase had passed, and there was a sort of mournful resignation in their present attitude toward the disease.
Albert Camus
#52. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
Dan Simmons
#53. He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
Peter Ackroyd
#54. I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.
Anita Brookner
#55. The man knows he's a target. He's very careful. The'll find the guns.'
Kolya responded with a mournful fart, low and solemn as a single note of a baritone horn.
David Benioff
#56. If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body.
Muammar Al-Gaddafi
#57. Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.
Franz Liszt
#58. Alas! that was the greatest of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the final step to be taken, but he must do it. Mournful destiny! he could only enter into the sanctity in the eyes of God, by returning into infamy in the eyes of men!
Victor Hugo
#59. Our grandsire, Adam, ere of Eve possesst,
Alone, and e'en in Paradise unblest,
With mournful looks the blissful scenes survey'd,
And wander'd in the solitary shade.
The Maker say, took pity, and bestow'd
Woman, the last, the best reserv'd of God.
Alexander Pope
#60. She laughed. I closed my eyes. It sounded damn mournful, that laugh of hers echoing off the square.
Esi Edugyan
#61. Even in the stifling bosom of the town,
A garden, in which nothing thrives, has charms
That soothes the rich possessor; much consol'd,
That here and there some sprigs of mournful mint,
Or nightshade, or valerian, grace the well
He cultivates.
William Cowper
#62. There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.
Robert Charles Wilson
#63. This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
Margaret Atwood
#64. As I go musing through this mournful land Soothed by the pine-tree's solemn harmony, Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me. I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand And talk of things I dimly understand, That thy dear spirit set to mine may be As to an intricate lock the simple key.
John Barlas
#65. I cried for it. That's how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.
Jack Kerouac
#66. She doesn't have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that's keeping her away from them is lack of willpower.
Margaret Atwood
#67. Blest be those feasts, with simple plenty crowned, Where all the ruddy family around Laugh at the jests or pranks that never fail Or sigh with pity at some mournful tale.
Oliver Goldsmith
#68. I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.
Franz Kafka
#69. In our civilization there are fearful hours - such are those when the criminal law pronounces shipwreck upon a man. What a mournful moment is that in which society withdraws itself and gives up a thinking being forever.
Victor Hugo
#70. When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood.
Georg Trakl
#71. Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face.
Lydia M. Child
#72. In vain would I seek to discover Why sad and mournful am I, My thoughts without ceasing brood over A tale of the time gone by.
Heinrich Heine
#73. The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.
Peter S. Beagle
#74. Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.
Plutarch
#75. I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.
David Benioff
#76. The music was so mournful and emotional that it seemed like the only suitable thing to play.
Deborah Curtis
#77. Fling out, fling out, with cheer and shout, To all the winds of Our Country's Banner! Be every bar, and every star, Displayed in full and glorious manner! Blow, zephyrs, blow, keep the dear ensign flying! Blow, zephyrs, sweetly mournful, sighing, sighing, sighing!
Abraham Coles
#78. Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
Jean Baudrillard
#79. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain ... There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.
Chief Seattle
#80. I would rather have this life of combat than the moral calm and mournful stupor of these last years. God give me struggle, enemies, howling crowds, all the combot of which I am capable.
Romain Rolland
#81. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die;
Mark Twain
