Love Which Tears Quotes & Sayings

Godlike the man who
sits at her side, who
watches and catches
that laughter
which (softly) tears me
to tatters: nothing is
left of me, each time
I see her ... — Catullus

The saints are sinners still. Our best tears need to be wept over, the strongest faith is mixed with unbelief, our most flaming love is cold compared with what Jesus deserves, and our intensest zeal still lacks the full fervor which the bleeding wounds and pierced heart of the crucified might claim at our hands. Our best things need a sin offering, or they would condemn us. — Charles Spurgeon

Then take it all! Take my life! What care I now that the wench is gone! Damn her! Damn her fickle heart! Ah, man, I hate her! Fickle wife! She taunts me, seduces me, cajoles me, flees me, leaves me wanting her all the more. Have I no more will of my own?"
His voice broke, and he sobbed, hiding his face behind an arm flung across it. Shanna's throat tightened, and there was no ease for the ache in her breat. With tears of her own gathering in her eyes she tried to hush him. He heard none of her pleas, but lifted his hands and held them before his eyes, turning them, staring at them as if he had never seen them before.
"But still - I love her. I could take my freedom and fly - but she holds me bound to her." His hands became limp fists which slowly crumpled to his sides as he groaned listlessly. "I cannot stay. I cannot leave." His eyes closed, and swiftly the moment was gone.
Choking on a sob, Shanna bowed her head in abject misery. — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles ... a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope. — Fernando De Rojas

Don't know what to do anymore,
I've lost the only love worth fighting for,
and I'll drown in my tears storming sea,
That would show you, that which make you hurt like me — A Fine Frenzy

Welcome the small cracking of your hard-clodded shell,
Embrace the warm sting of tears,
Kiss the shadow which frightens you awake as you turn the corners of your day,
Love the whole of everything,
Smooth sunshine skies and
Jagged edges
Which all seek us out in
Constant whisper and touch
To say, 'hello, Beautiful. You're alive — Jacob Nordby

Adieu! but let me cherish, still, The hope with which I cannot part. Contempt may wound, and coldness chill, But still it lingers in my heart. And who can tell but Heaven, at last, May answer all my thousand prayers, And bid the future pay the past With joy for anguish, smiles for tears? — Anne Bronte

The more I think of it, the more our ideas, our idols and our so-called holy practices, and those of our visions which supposedly are ineffable, all seem to me to be engendered merely by the stirrings of the human machine, exactly as is the wind from our nostrils or from our netherparts, and as is our sweat and salty water from tears, or the white blood passed in love, or the muddy excrement of the body. It enraged me to think that man should so waste his own substance in construction of theories that were almost always pernicious, and should speak of chastity before having examined the whole machinery of sex; that he should debate the question of free will instead of pondering the thousand obscure reasons which, for example, cause you to blink if I suddenly point a stick at your eyes; or that he should talk of Hell before having looked more closely into the question of death. — Marguerite Yourcenar

What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities, to which we give the names of power, possession, misfortune, and death. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

LADY CAPULET: Evermore weeping for your
cousin's death?
What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears?
An if thou couldst, thou couldst not make him live;
Therefore, have done: some grief shows much of love;
But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
JULIET: Yet let me weep for such a feeling loss.
LADY CAPULET: So shall you feel the loss,
but not the friend
Which you weep for.
JULIET: Feeling so the loss,
Cannot choose but ever weep the friend.
LADY CAPULET: Well, girl, thou weep'st not so much for
his death,
As that the villain lives which slaughter'd him. — William Shakespeare

Love can take what shape he pleases; and when once begun his fiery inroad in the soul, how vain the after knowledge which his presence gives! We weep or rave; but still he lives, and lives master and lord, amidst pride and tears and pain. — Bryan Procter

There comes an end to summer,
To spring showers and hoar rime;
His mumming to each mummer
Has somewhere end in time,
And since life ends and laughter,
And leaves fall and tears dry,
Who shall call love immortal,
When all that is must die ?

Nay, sweet, let's leave unspoken
The vows the fates gainsay,
For all vows made are broken,
We love but while we may.
Let's kiss when kissing pleases,
And part when kisses pall,
Perchance, this time to-morrow,
We shall not love at all.

You ask my love completest,
As strong next year as now,
The devil take you, sweetest,
Ere I make aught such vow.
Life is a masque that changes,
A fig for constancy!
No love at all were better,
Than love which is not free."

-"To His Mistress — Ernest Dowson

Why, such is love's transgression.
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
With more of thine: this love that thou hast shown
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
Farewell, my coz. — William Shakespeare

I love my country, by which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout its history, who have fought the government to make right. Where so many cunning sons and daughters, our foremothers and forefathers came singing through slaughter, came through hell and high water so that we could stand here, and behold breathlessly the sight; how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light. Why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those that fought for this? — Ani DiFranco

Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves. — Guy De Maupassant

Eid Crescent
I feed on bitterness and satiety never comes.
Today sadness has renewed itself.
Let me narrate the story of two souls,
Whose love was struck by the evil eye,
In a twist which Fate had hidden.
Luck won't smile and Time will scorch.
Only the stars know what is wrong with me.
I almost sense them craning to wipe my tears away. — Leila Aboulela

To accept what is bitter; acceptance must not be allowed to project itself on to the bitterness and lessen it; otherwise the force and purity of the acceptance are proportionally lessened. For the object of the acceptance is to taste what is bitter, as such, and not anything else. (St. Thomas on the suffering of Christ.) - To say like Ivan Karamazov: nothing can possibly make up for a single tear from a single child. And yet to accept all tears, and the countless horrors which lie beyond tears. To accept these things not simply in so far as they may admit of compensations, but in themselves. To accept that they should exist, simply because they do exist.
To accept that event because it exists, and by this acceptance to love God through and beyond it. To accept that it should exist, because it does exist, what exactly does this mean? Is it not simply to recognize that it is?
When one loves God through and beyond evil as such, it is indeed God whom one loves. — Simone Weil

One minute you're closer to someone than anyone in the whole world, next minute they need only to say the words 'time apart', 'serious talk' or 'maybe you ... ' and you're never going to see them again and will have to spend the next six months having imaginary conversations in which they beg to come back, and bursting into tears at the sight of their toothbrush. — Helen Fielding

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn't what I had imagined at all. — Jane Goodall

Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the 'fight with fire' method which you suggest is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that. Yes, love - which means understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one's enemies - is the solution to the race problem. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Socrates: Yes mercy and grace are all linked with Love. Let your tears of gratitude wash away the dark dirt of ignorance obscuring your own dear Self which is Love.
Charmides: So Love has nothing to do with lust then?
Socrates: No! Lust is from the selfish false sense of a 'me' desperate for some pleasurable, momentary relief from its anguish and boredom. Love is refined, and her amorous advances are from the spirit, not the body. — Alan Jacobs

Love discovered me all weaponless,
and opened the way to the heart through the eyes,
which are made the passageways and doors of tears:
so that it seems to me it does him little honour
to wound me with his arrow, in that state,
he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed — Francesco Petrarca

I am ME ...
I am Special Becoz I am Unique,
I am the Stardust which everyone seek.
I am the Light and the Hope,
Walking on an Everlasting Rope..
I am Hugs and Sometimes Tears,
I am the Sky, the Sea and the Earth.
I am the Colour No One can Name..
I Trust Yet I Fear ...
I Hide yet I don't hold anything back,
I am Free ...
I am the Words " I Love You"
I am swirls of Red , Pink and Blue. — Neha Donald

For some reason, the smell brings tears to my eyes. I almost feel like I'm saying goodbye to him, which is ridiculous because I'm seeing him again in just a few hours. It's like saying goodbye to a dream that was never mine in the first place. Love is the worst. — Jacqueline E. Smith

With lovers, though, the end is always there. It is a death as certain as the real death, and those of us in love, as at the bedside, begin to prepare ourselves. We might say it isn't working, or I can't give you what you need, and yet a day later there he is in your arms, and who can help it? There is the good-bye, and the good-bye, and the good-bye, and which will stick? Who can ever say, this is the last? One one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time. — Andrew Sean Greer

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me. — Stephen Fry

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made. — John Crowley

Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears. — Honore De Balzac

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.

I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.

"You — Carol Ann Duffy

Mrs. O'Dowd woke up her Major, and had as comfortable a cup of coffee prepared for him as any made that morning in Brussels. And who is there will deny that this worthy lady's preparations betokened affection as much as the fits of tears and hysterics by which more sensitive females exhibited their love, and that their partaking of this coffee, which they drank together while the bugles were sounding the turn-out and the drums beating in the various quarters of the town, was not more useful and to the purpose than the outpouring of any mere sentiment could be? The consequence — William Makepeace Thackeray

Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we're in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues. — Frederick Buechner

When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

Did I learn to be kinder,
To be more patient,
And more generous,
More loving,
More ready to laugh,
And more easy to accept honest tears?
If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives. — Maya Angelou

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring. ... So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. A — Alain De Botton

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. — James Joyce

it is your life and you have to live your life as you want but you must have courage to pay by your self for the life which you are living , if someone other is paying by their tears and grief for your enjoyment ,then you are living a shameful life. — Mohammed Zaki Ansari

And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict tat could occur between two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each others' arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks. — Milan Kundera

Coupla weeks ago, you gave me a fuckin' sweet nightie and words I loved hearing."
I felt my entire body go still as I held his eyes.
"Forgot to mention I feel the same," he stated and my insides hollowed out.
"What?" I breathed.
"Put down the rice and come here, baby, I wanna tell you I love you when you're in my
arms."
I didn't move. I stared at him, my internal organs gone but still, my body managed to
produce tears which gathered in my eyes and then promptly and silently slid down my
cheeks. — Kristen Ashley

For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool? — Stendhal

The man who has not seen such tears in the eyes of his beloved does not know the height of happiness to which, with mingled joy and gratitude and modesty, a woman can attain. — Ivan Turgenev

There is eloquence in the tongueless
wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the
reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something
within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless
rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like
the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved
singing to you alone. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Although people call love a capricious and unaccountable emotion that arises like an illness, nonetheless it has its own laws and reasons, like everything else. If these laws have been little studied so far, that is because a person struck down by love is in no condition to observe with a scholar's eye as the impression steals into his soul and shackles his emotions like a dream, as first his eyes go blind, at which moment his pulse and then his heart begin beating harder, all of a sudden there arises as of yesterday an undying devotion, the desire to sacrifice oneself; one's I gradually vanishes and crosses over into him or her; the mind becomes wither unusually dull or unusually sharp; the will surrenders to the will of another; and the head bows, the knees shake and the tears and fever come. — Ivan Goncharov

He raked his hand through his hair. 'This is more difficult than I'd anticipated.'
Good, she thought. If he was going to break her heart, she didn't want it to be easy for him.
'What I'm trying to say is that I had it all wrong. I don't want a wife who...'
'You don't want a wife?' she choked.
'No!' he practically yelled. Then he continued in a more normal tone, 'I don't want a wife who will look the other way if I stray.'
'You want me to /watch?/
'No, I want you to be furious.'
Ellie was by now on the verge of tears. 'You deliberately want to make me angry? To hurt me?'
'No. Oh, God, you've got it all wrong...I just want you to love me so much that if I did [be unfaithful] - which I'm not going to - you would want to have me drawn and quartered. — Julia Quinn

The Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story - and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love. — J.R.R. Tolkien

She knew her husband would never stray, so highly did he value that which he'd waited nearly six thousand years to know, so precious was it to him: love. She knew he would be there with her until the very end, that he would cherish each wrinkle, every line in her face, because in the final analysis they were not a negation of life but an affirmation of a life well lived. Proof positive of laughter and tears, of joy and grief, of passion, of living. — Karen Marie Moning

Sometimes I don't understand why my arms don't drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn't melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don't come, when I find I haven't written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy. — Gustave Flaubert

Oh, God, I would give anything to change the past," he gasped. "To make it so that the last thing you saw was not me walking away from you. In your memories I am forever one and twenty, and cocky, and sneering, and looking self-righteous. And I've changed, Beth," he gasped, choking on a sob he could not hide. "I want so damn much for you to see how I've changed. To see me now. There are no lies in my eyes. No motives other than to show you that I am not the callous man I was. And that I love you ... . I love you so damn much."
He was crying. The tears trickled unchecked down his cheeks, dripping onto his lips. She touched them, wiped them away, which only caused them to spill faster and harder. — Charlotte Featherstone

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing. — Khushwant Singh

Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of that composure and tranquillity of mind which is so necessary to happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of gratitude and love. — Adam Smith

mong the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying. — Wilkie Collins

Alas, madame," Raoul humbly replied, unable to restrain his tears, "alas, I believe that Christine really does love him!...But it is not only that which drives me to despair; for what I am not certain of, madame, is that the man whom Christine loves is worthy of her love!" "It is for me to be the judge of that, monsieur!" said Christine, looking Raoul angrily in the face. — Gaston Leroux

Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine --
And if you lack the heart's rich blood, take mine.
Love thrives on inextinguishable pain;
Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again. — Farid Al-Din Attar

O me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight!
... Or, if they have, where is my judgment fled,
That censures falsely what they see aright?
If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,
What means the world to say it is not so?
If it be not, then love doth well denote
Love's eye is not so true as all men's 'No.'
How can it? O, how can Love's eye be true,
That is so vex'd with watching and with tears?
No marvel then, though I mistake my view;
The sun itself sees not till heaven clears.
O cunning Love! with tears thou keep'st me blind,
Lest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find.
- Shakespeare's Sonnet 148 — William Shakespeare

But my whole body is one pain. I cannot stand on my legs anymore. I stagger. I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill with smarting tears. I want to be crucified on the wall, but I cannot. My body becomes heavier and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My flesh is enraged against me.
I hear voices through the wall. The next room vibrates with a distant sound, a mist of sound which scarcely comes through the wall.
I shall not be able to listen anymore, or look into the room, or hear anything distinctly. And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced. — Henri Barbusse

I'm all used up inside, love." Two tears slid down her cheeks. "That's not how I see you at all." "Which says more about you than it does about me, darling. I'm sorry." He — Kristan Higgins

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love
it's being unhappy together. — Graham Greene

That fellow was like all of us: descended from good people who were stolen from their families and country, sailed over the sea, and forced into slavery. 'We don't let them steal our dignity,' that preacher said. Richard, his name was. He said they cannot steal our honor, our strength, or our love." "True words," I said. "Do you know what he said about this America?" Henry asked. I shook my head. "Remember, lads?" Henry asked his mates. "Join with me. He said, 'This land . . .'" A half dozen voices spoke with Henry, strong black men sharing the preacher's words like a hymn or a prayer. "'Which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country.'" The words drifted up to the stars with the sparks from the fire. "We go to war, Missus Isabel," Henry added, "in order to make our mother country, this land, free for everyone. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Oh, I know, I know that heart, that wild but grateful heart, gentlemen of the jury! It will bow before your mercy; it thirsts for a great and loving action, it will melt and mount upwards. There are souls which, in their limitation, blame the whole world. But subdue such a soul with mercy, show it love, and it will curse its past, for there are many good impulses in it. Such a heart will expand and see that God is merciful and that men are good and just. He will be horror-stricken; he will be crushed by remorse and the vast obligation laid upon him henceforth. And he will not say then, 'I am quits,' but will say, 'I am guilty in the sight of all men and am more unworthy than all.' With tears of penitence and poignant, tender anguish, he will exclaim: 'Others are better than I, they wanted to save me, not to ruin me! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My brothers were still catching sparrows when my cousin told me to give him the baby bird. I didn't want to, but I took the squirming bird out of my pocket anyway. I wanted another look at it. It was so small. I don't think it could fly yet. My cousin plucked the bird from my palm and went off with it. I should never have taken it out of my pocket. When he returned, the birds were all burnt to a crisp. Their bones were popping out of their skin. I couldn't even tell which of the birds was mine. I looked at their burnt feathers and blackened skin and burst into tears. I cried for him to give me back my bird, but it was too late. My yelling must have irritate him, because he grabbed the smallest one and shoved it in my face, and said, 'Here it is.' When I took that charred baby bird from him, I felt the world crash down on me. It was the first time I had ever held something that had died. I love you as much as the sorrow I felt. — Kyung-Sook Shin

The fact that Ridge has been honest in his conversations with me is not something he did wrong. The fact that he has feelings for me also isn't wrong, when you know exactly how much he's fought those feelings. People can't control matters of the heart, Warren.
They can only control their actions, which is exactly what Ridge did. He lost control once for ten seconds, but after that, every single time temptation reared its ugly head, he walked in the other direction. The only thing Ridge has done wrong is fail to delete his messages, because by doing so, he failed to protect Maggie. He failed to protect her from the harsh truth that people don't get to choose who they fall in love with. They only get to choose who they stay in love with." I look up at the ceiling and blink back tears. "He was choosing to stay in love with her, Warren. Why can't she see that? This will kill him so much more than it's killing her. — Colleen Hoover

In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one's heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away. — C.S. Lewis

After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing. — Leo Tolstoy

The Lord compensates the faithful for every loss. That which is taken away from those who love the Lord will be added unto them in His own way. While it may not come at the time we desire, the faithful will know that every tear today will eventually be returned a hundredfold with tears of rejoicing and gratitude. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul awaken the spirits to dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes ... — Percy Bysshe Shelley

That poem was not by me. It is among the things which quite overpower me; I have never been able to read it without tears coming to my eyes; it sounds like a voice for which I have been waiting and waiting since childhood. The poem is by my friend Lou ... She is as shrewd as an eagle and brave as a lion, and yet still a very girlish child, who perhaps will not live long. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world.

Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture.
Imagine all kinds of people everywhere
getting committed to human excellence,
getting committed to closing the gap
between the human condition
and the human potential...
And imagine all of us hooked up
with a common high tech communications system.
That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes.
Human excellence is an ideal
that we can embed
into every formal human structure
on our planet.
And that's really why we're going to do this.
And that's also why
The Meta Network is a creation
we can love.

Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable. — Jon Ronson

The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel was lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did. — Pope John XXIII

When death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. — Charles Dickens

I dread the loss of her I've never touched
love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears
I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak
I miss a woman who was never born
I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet
Everything passes
Everything perishes
Everything palls
my thought walks away with a killing smile
leaving discordant anxiety
which roars in my soul
No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope — Sarah Kane

Even now, talking about those days, tears well up in my eyes, my indefatigable heart pounds rebelliously and still suffers, and my former, stormy passion bursts into my soul with these remembrances! Tedious, profound, burning recollections oppress me. I don't love him any longer: love for my first friend died and grew cold long since, but even now, when I start talking about him, it's as if I begin to love him all over again! The human heart feels deeply - its innermost depths are immeasurable, dark, and strange; and that which is lost in it often comes to the surface unexpectedly and fills the whole being with long-lost, lifeless feeling. — Evgeniya Tur

As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead.
The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known; as a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or even the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; and which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened, for no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall them. — Charles Dickens

He was living, breathing poetry. Not love poetry, but the poetry which tears out your heart, rips it to shreds, pushes it back into your chest, and makes you question what the hell just obliterated your soul. — Tillie Cole

When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities, then we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us pretty freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children, and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, to inchoately remember, to feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what is both firing our energy and providing us a prism through which to see and understand. — Ronald Rolheiser

Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don't leave now that you're here -
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine. — Faiz Ahmad Faiz

We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.
We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.
Which of us were fortunate
who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love
life.
Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you. — Richard Aldington

Selfishness so often is the basis of money problems, which are a very serious and real factor affecting the stability of family life. Selfishness is at the root of adultery, the breaking of solemn and sacred covenants to satisfy selfish lust. Selfishness is the antithesis of love. It is a cankering expression of greed. It destroys self-discipline. It obliterates loyalty. It tears up sacred covenants. It afflicts both men and women. — Gordon B. Hinckley

And the next day the gondolier came with a train of other gondoliers, all decked in their holiday garb, and on his gondola sat Angela, happy, and blushing at her happiness. Then he and she entered the house in which I dwelt, and came into my room (and it was strange indeed, after so many years of inversion, to see her with her head above her feet!), and then she wished me happiness and a speedy restoration to good health (which could never be); and I in broken words and with tears in my eyes, gave her the little silver crucifix that had stood by my bed or my table for so many years. And Angela took it reverently, and crossed herself, and kissed it, and so departed with her delighted husband.
And as I heard the song of the gondoliers as they went their way
the song dying away in the distance as the shadows of the sundown closed around me
I felt that they were singing the requiem of the only love that had ever entered my heart. — W.S. Gilbert

On our earth we can only love sincerely with suffering and through suffering. We do not know how to love any other way and know no other love. I want to suffer so that I can love. I desire, I thirst in this moment to kiss, weeping tears, that very earth which I left and I do not desire or accept life on any other ! ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them
wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the rich and the strong of those simple things that the poor needed, those scraps which would make their life more bearable; this happened, and could make even the reading of a newspaper an exercise in sorrow. There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily, so easily avoidable; but one could not think just of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one's time in tears
and the unkindnesses would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one's own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. — Alexander McCall Smith

N.V.N.
(translated by Jane Kenyon)
There is a sacred, secret line in loving
which attraction and even passion cannot cross,
even if lips draw near in awful silence
and love tears at the heart.
Friendship is weak and useless here,
and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,
because the soul is free and does not know
the slow luxuries of sensual life.
Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand. — Anna Akhmatova