Topic

Sadness

Sadness in this collection is distinguished from grief and sorrow by its quietness. Spinoza's do-not-weep-do-not-be-indignant-understand is the Stoic instruction: sadness is the signal to think more carefully, not to react. Anatole France on the melancholy of even longed-for changes is the most precisely observed entry: we grieve what we leave behind even when we are glad to leave it. Shakespeare on love-as-smoke-made-with-the-fume-of-sighs gives sadness its alchemical relationship to love: the same material, transformed by different temperatures. Bierce on the year as a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments is the calendar made honest. De Musset on remembering happiness in the day of sorrow is the cognitive amplification that makes sadness most acute. Martin Luther on the wife-making-the-husband-glad-to-come-home places sadness in the domestic economy: the relationship's health is measured by the direction of the feeling at the threshold. The anonymous better-safe-than-sorry gives sadness a preventive strategy, which is either practical wisdom or a life unnecessarily narrowed.

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Year: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments

Source: The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

Source: Walden (1854)

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs

The woman cries before the wedding and the man after.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy

One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched

It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well nor the judgment to hold their tongues

Sometimes only one person is missing and the whole world seems depopulated

A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain

Better safe than sorry

Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.

As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic, if it is pulled out I shall die

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age