There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow.
Source: Mansfield Park (1814)
Topic
Sorrow in this collection is distinguished from grief by its relationship to memory. De Musset's there-is-no-worse-sorrow-than-remembering-happiness-in-the-day-of-sorrow is the defining entry: sorrow has a cognitive dimension that pure grief does not — it requires knowing what has been lost and holding the contrast. Twain's secret-source-of-humor-is-sorrow is the structural paradox that the whole collection of comic aphorisms depends on: comedy is not the opposite of sorrow but its transformation. Jean Paul's sorrows-gathering-around-great-souls-as-storms-around-mountains gives sorrow a topographic dignity: what breaks on the great soul also breaks against it and disperses. Hesiod's marriage-and-the-sorrows-women-cause is the oldest entry, and the most culturally positioned: some sorrows in the collection are the sorrows of the ancient world, and their presence here is itself instructive. Addison on indulging his sorrows is the honest record of someone who knows the experience from the inside and is not pretending otherwise.
There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow.
Many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the deep.
There lay a young man, fast asleep--sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both.
It was simply that she could not go away.
There was something in the air, something sad and sweet at the same time.
In short, LIVING seems to me a business for which I was not made, and yet...!