Quotes about Grief

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. 

If you are not living,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you
have died,
all the leaves will fall on my breast,
it will rain upon my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with cold and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to march toward where you sleep,
but
I shall go on living,
because you wanted me to be, above all things,
untamable,
and, love, because you know that I am not just one man,
but all men.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.

For life is eternal and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. 

Grief is the price we pay for love.

If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even ,you experience them fully and completely You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "Alright I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.

Laugh and a moment will soon arrive when you cry.

"There's no way around grief and loss: you can doge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully come out the other side.  The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left."

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

One joy shatters a hundred griefs.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief... and unspeakable love.

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that a part of us shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it is completely filled, it will nevertheless remain something changed forever...

Wrapped in grief is the gift of joy.

Birth and death are events in time and space.... there is nothing but Life.

I sometimes hold it half a sin, To put in words the grief I feel. For words, like nature, half reveal, And half conceal the soul within.

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror up to where you're bravely working.

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

Even sorrow or sympathy for the afflicted, or grief for the passing of loved ones, unbalances the body cells and makes one vulnerable to infections or destructive toxins, for such emotions have no relation to love or the inner joyousness of love-inspired man, nor are they within the God-Mind which alone knows unchanging ecstasy.
... Grief is selfish. It is indulged in for self-gratification, not for love. Cosmic man knows the beauty and unreality of death. Sympathy for the afflicted makes a reality of the affliction by its recognition as an infliction, while sorrow for the loss of anything, or for the »unfortunate« condition of anybody, is forgetful of the beauty and abundance of all-giving God and Nature.
The Mind of God knows but one unchanging emotion – ECSTASY – the ecstasy of Love – the ecstasy which has its beginnings in an inner joyousness of one who is far on the road to the discovery of his immortal Self.

"Hope is grief's best music."

When my father died, I moved into the space he left inside me and found out it was where I belonged.

Courage is resistance to fear, not absence of it

I suspect that if we could sum up in a single sentence what our purpose in life would be - it's that we were born to be "fully Self-expressive".  And we could put a big chunk of the world's suffering under the categories of "suffering because we know that we're not expressing our Selves fully, or mourning that we don't even know who that is, or that we lost touch with that Self somewhere along the way".  It's incredibly frustrating to know that you have something inside of you like that and to not be quite reaching the point of giving birth to it - to be bringing it out into the world.

Grief is neither a disorder nor a healing process; it is a sign of health itself, a whole and natural gesture of love. Nor must we see grief as a step toward something better. No matter how much it hurts—and it may be the greatest pain in life—grief can be an end in itself, a pure expression of love.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

I believe imagination is stronger than knowledge - that myth is more potent than history.  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts - That hope always triumphs over experience - That laughter is the only cure for grief.  And I believe that love is stronger than death.

"From craving is born grief, from craving is born fear. For one freed from craving there's no grief- so how fear?"

All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life
not knowing what grief is.

All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life
not knowing what grief is.

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 and their understanding.