Grief Quotes

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• The only way that I can aEURoehandleaEURx9d grief, then, is the same way that I aEURoehandleaEURx9d Love aEUR” by not aEURoehandlingaEURx9d it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.
• Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before aEUR” more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
• How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements aEUR” how little of your own was left to you.
• Sometimes, this world is tough because we shame and diminish ordinary… We chase extraordinary moments instead of being grateful for ordinary moments until hard shit happens. Then, in the face of the really hard stuff aEUR” illness, death, loss aEUR” the only thing we’re begging for is a normal moment.
• It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad, or spend a lot of time carefully going through your accounts and administering your estate, or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it.
• On funerals, loss, grief, friendship, and support: It’s not about knowing what to say. It’s about being there when nobody knows what to say. The only thing people need to hear is, aEURoeYou are not alone.aEURx9d And that doesn’t require words. It just requires your presence.
• People talk as if grief were just a feeling aEUR” as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
• From craving is born grief, from craving is born fear. For one freed from craving there’s no grief aEUR” so how fear?
• Omnia mors A|quat. aEURoeDeath levels all things.
• Part 1. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body aEUR” it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level.
• Being silly is important. It’s the opposite of grief. It’s throwing yourself into a moment without care. You can’t always maintain status as a dignified person aEUR” it gives you blinders. When you always expect the world to fulfill your expectations, it wears you down. It closes you off.
• When grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, aEURoeOh my god, this is happening right now,aEURx9d and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.
• Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out aEUR” it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives aEUR” it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.
• Ancient as well as modern civilisations have tried to go beyond death, to somehow conquer it, to imagine there is immortality, a life after death aEUR” anything but face it.
• Part 3. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.
• Part 2. I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief.
• Part 1. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body aEUR” it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level.
• Only by dying each day can there be eternal renewal.
• Despair can never be dissolved through escape, but by observing it.
• I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.
• The trick to healing from suffering is deciding that the pain was worth it.
• Whether this moment is happy or not depends on you. It’s you that makes the moment happy. It’s not the moment that makes you happy.
• Gratitude eliminates fear, worry, grief, and depression, and brings happiness, clarity, patience, kindness, compassion, understanding, and peace of mind.
• That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.
• It is virtually impossible to be happy when terrible things happen. There may be great sadness and grief, but it is possible to remain peaceful and accept reality as it is. Happiness is not inner peace.
• The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.
• May this be the season we choose healing over distraction.
• Healing doesn’t eliminate all the hard moments. It changes how you handle them.
• As we tell ourselves the truth, clarity comes, grief comes, healing comes, wisdom comes. Self-deception delays the process.
• Time…does not ‘console,’ as people say superficially; at best it puts things in their place and creates order.
• You can start healing if you face reality and avoid lies. You can find peace if you love yourself and keep going.
• To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
• Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
• He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
• Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.
• I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.
• The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
• See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it.
• But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
• I will practice coming back to the present moment…not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past or letting anxieties, fears, or cravings pull me out.
• Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
• Memories hurt if they are not accepted as memories. Thereafter, they become dreams.
• Don’t let your wound pick your next chapter. Heal first then decide.
• The double grief of a lost bliss is to recall its happy hour in pain.
• For grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.
• The things to which you are attached will take control of your life.
• You can’t exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind.
• One must face the natural calamities with a calm head .
• Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
• One of the hardest things you will ever have to do my dear is grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.
• Stiffness is thus a companion of death; flexibility a companion of life.
• Those who live deeply keep in mind they will die someday. They cry, they get up, they keep going.
• On the other side of our anxiety is the realization that life can go on even when it is drastically different than the life we planned.
• As you outgrow survival mode, you begin to dream again. You begin to risk believing more is possible for your life.
• After you grieve what could have been, you can build a beautiful life with what remains as you prepare for what is to come.
• Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.
• Omnia mors A|quat. aEURoeDeath levels all things.
• Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.
• Death weighs heavy on one who, too well known to all, died unknown to himself.
• To acknowledge death is not to fear it. The latter is much worse, because in fearing death we tend to avoid things that involve a risk of dying, which are often the things most worth living for.
• Ancient as well as modern civilisations have tried to go beyond death, to somehow conquer it, to imagine there is immortality, a life after death aEUR” anything but face it.
• Zen has no secrets other than seriously thinking about birth-and-death.
• A man’s days are numbered. Though this man may be in perfect health, he is terminal. There is perhaps no greater realization than this.
• He who is of a rare sort, whose eyes drift toward the heavens, who harbors a nature considered unsuitable for this world, will see the emptiness of society, and the shallowness of the ways of men. So that he may make wise use of this one life, and die not an ignorant death.
• Your entire life is a bombardment of messages. Do this, do that. Become this, become that. Be more of this, be less of that. Practice this, practice that… Amidst all of your doings, Amidst all of your becomings, death will snatch you in mid-stride.
• The student prepares for life. The master prepares for death.
• A leaf falls. A tree dies. A season ends. Still, life continues.
• Don’t compare your pain with anybody else’s. Your path in unique to you.
• What if we could view death as just another stage of life?
• Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
• The purpose of suffering is to connect you to your Self. It indicates that you got carried away by all the transient things around you.
• I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
• And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
• If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can’t someone be healed by happiness?
• How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements aEUR” how little of your own was left to you.
• The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.
• Just as all vices become deep-rooted unless they are crushed when they spring up, so, too, such a state of sadness and wretchedness, with its self-afflicted torture, feeds at last upon its very bitterness, and the grief of an unhappy mind becomes a morbid pleasure.
• Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before aEUR” more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
• Grief is depression in proportion to circumstances; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.
• It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and anger flow in tears when they need to.
• When all you see is darkness day after day is exactly when you must jump in the void and trust life again.
• Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
• Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.
• Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.
• Let your tears come. Let them water your soul.
• Some people care too much, I think it’s called love.
• Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
• Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
• The only way that I can aEURoehandleaEURx9d grief, then, is the same way that I aEURoehandleaEURx9d Love aEUR” by not aEURoehandlingaEURx9d it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.
• Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted… Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, grief has a lot in common with love.
• No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom and loyalty.
• Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.
• When you love you’re indeed alive. When you cry you’re indeed human.
• The depth of our grief is simply the price we pay for the extent of our love.
• I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you.
• Love is an engraved invitation to grief.
• Patience is a remedy for every sorrow.
• There is such a thing as moderation even in grieving.
• My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping but I shall go on living.
• In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.
• There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month.
• When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.
• On funerals, loss, grief, friendship, and support: It’s not about knowing what to say. It’s about being there when nobody knows what to say. The only thing people need to hear is, aEURoeYou are not alone.aEURx9d And that doesn’t require words. It just requires your presence.
• Sometimes, this world is tough because we shame and diminish ordinary… We chase extraordinary moments instead of being grateful for ordinary moments until hard shit happens. Then, in the face of the really hard stuff aEUR” illness, death, loss aEUR” the only thing we’re begging for is a normal moment.
• Not that grief vanishes…but that it begins in time to coexist with pleasure; sorrow sits right beside the rediscovery of what is to be cherished in experience. Just when you think you’re done.
• Give yourself space to grieve. Honor your loved ones. Speak their names. Carry their wisdom.
• He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.
• Your father is in every cell of our body. You can be in touch with him at every moment.
• For that which is otherwise quite indigestible, all affliction, vexation, loss, grief, time alone digests.
• By honoring what has passed away, we are free to love the life that is here.
• I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you’ve been mourning even in your sleep.
• The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
• Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.
• Loss will give you humility. Humility will give you wisdom.
• Sorrow makes men sincere.
• I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.
• Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.
• Life is not opposed to death nor is death a darkening of life.
• Only intense self-awareness can eradicate the cause of sorrow.
• Abandon yesterday, tomorrow and today. Cross over to the farthest shore beyond life and death.
• The fates guide the person who accepts them and hinder the person who resists them.
• Buddha’s doctrine: man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.
• A fountain gets muddy with but little stirring up, and does not get clear by our meddling with it but by our leaving it alone. The best remedy for disturbances is to let them run their course, for so they quiet down.
• Death will take everything away. Think about that. Everything you’ve accumulated, fought for, worried over, everything will go. Why not let it all go now when you’re still living. Renounce it mentally. Then you can live freely and fearlessly because you’ve nothing to lose.
• Grief is natural; the absence of all feeling is undesirable, but moderation in grief should be observed, as in the face of all good or evil.
• Avoid lies so you can see reality. Fools seek distractions. The wise sit, wait and try to understand.
• The world is afflicted by death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realized the nature of the world.
• Our soul is governed by four invisible forces: love, death, power and time.
• Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart.
• The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.
• Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
• Don’t confuse your grief with guilt.
• Accepting a situation is not a voluntary response. You either understand that something cannot be changed, or you do not.
• Which one of you ever dared to think about exile, about poverty, about grief?
• A man lifting his head from the very funeral pyre must need some novel vocabulary not drawn from ordinary everyday condolence to comfort his own dear ones. But every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself.
• When grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, aEURoeOh my god, this is happening right now,aEURx9d and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.
• Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.
• Amor fati is about loving what happens and making use of it.
• Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.
• It took me years to see the gift. And that was the greatest one.
• Grief is a gift, something you have to earn.
• When grief is deepest, words are fewest.
• Be gentle with yourself: You are doing the best you can.
• To heal a wound, you must stop scratching it.
• We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.
• Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.
• The good news: it is possible to use suffering as a call for wider awakening in the world.
• To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad.
• Healing from trauma is not an intellectual exercise. You cannot simply think your way out of it. Your healing requires your full participation: spirit, heart, mind, and body.
• Give yourself space and permission to feel, to grieve, to speak truth, to be speechless, to let go, to hold tightly, to mobilize, to be still, to be where you are. Your process doesn’t have to match anyone else’s in content or in time.
• Wisdom lies in cheerful acceptance of whatever life throws at you. Easier said than done, I know. But what is the alternative? If you cannot change something, it is best to accept it cheerfully rather than adding to one’s misfortune by grieving over it.
• Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief, as long as you make room for other things too.
• Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished.
• Grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it’s feeling. You’re not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.
• Being silly is important. It’s the opposite of grief. It’s throwing yourself into a moment without care. You can’t always maintain status as a dignified person aEUR” it gives you blinders. When you always expect the world to fulfill your expectations, it wears you down. It closes you off.
• Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.
• Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.
• People who love you and care for you will be present and ready, when you are.
• In life, obstacles are needed for us to grow. Problems occur not to us but for us.
• The antidote to misery is to stay present.
• What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
• Beyond death there is resurection. Beyond grief, there is joy.
• As your heart heals so does your vision. Regaining clarity is life changing.
• After the grieving, the gift of life shows up reminding us why we’re still here.
• Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
• When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
• Be content with the moment and be willing to follow the flow; then there will be no room for grief or joy.
• On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.
• I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
• When you can maintain peace and joy within you despite any situation on the outside, you have become the master of all circumstances and master of your life.
• No matter who you are, no matter where you are, gratitude can dissolve all negativity in your life, regardless of what form it has taken.
• The road continues, there are still pages to read, sunrises to see and mountains to conquer. Don’t give up.
• Go beyond love and grief, exist for the good of mankind.
• I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.
• Your wounded heart is a very beautiful heart.
• After you grieve what could have been, prepare for what can be.
• A man may win many battles, but death will win the war.
• The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.
• Bear without murmuring what cannot be changed.
• The greater the love the greater the grief.
• Life is unfair. Death is natural. Accept.
• Grief is just love with no place to go.
• Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
• We need never be ashamed of our tears.
• Make peace with the present moment.
• Loss is not as bad as wanting more.
• Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.
• Grief is itself a medicine.
• Life is a blink.
• Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
• 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.
• On Kobe Bryant’s death: I haven’t felt a pain that sharp in a while… I just wish I could say something to him.
• On Kobe Bryant’s death: Tragedies like this have a cruel way of reminding us of what’s important in life: spending time with our loved ones, and being there for them no matter what.
• People keep asking me how I’m doing, and I’m not always sure how to answer that. It depends on the day. It depends on the minute. Right this moment, I’m OK. Yesterday, not so good. Tomorrow, we’ll see.
• The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.
• We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud.
• He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
• From craving is born grief, from craving is born fear. For one freed from craving there’s no grief aEUR” so how fear?
• To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
• Time is the wisest counsellor of all.
• People talk as if grief were just a feeling aEUR” as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
• I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.
• Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
• Those who are attached to things will suffer greatly.
• It’s hard to explain so much pain.
• The things which hurt, instruct.
• Grief is the price we pay for love.
• Joy is rejoicing what is, and sorrow is craving for what isn’t.
• Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
• It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent, when they are not.
• Tears are words the heart can’t express.
• Dark is the atmosphere. Hopeful you must be.
• People generally don’t change unless a traumatic event occurs in their life which triggers the brain into new action.
• Die each day; die each day to yourself, to your misery, to your sorrow; put aside that burden so that your mind is fresh, young and innocent.
• True that we don’t know what we’ve got till we lose it, but also true that we don’t know what we’ve been missing until it arrives.
• We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.
• Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.
• The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God.
• Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.
• At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed.
• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
• Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
• The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.
• How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.
• Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly.
• Thought is time, time is sorrow.
• It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.
• Reality hurts when you fight it. It makes you strong when you accept it.
• Death is a reminder to live fully.
• No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.
• This is not the life you pictured but here you are. You can still make something beautiful. Grieve. Breathe. Begin again.
• There are times when explanations, no matter how reasonable, just don’t seem to help.
• People just disappear sometimes. You have to love and appreciate them while they’re near you.
• Relax. One bad chapter does not mean it’s the end of the book.
• Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.
• Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.
• Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it.