Sad Life Experience Quotes & Sayings

We're done, this is over. I'm packing your shit and you're leaving." I'm sorry, I love you, please forgive me. "Everything is fucked up, don't you get that? It's ruined, all of it is ruined and you need to fucking leave." I'm so sorry, I love you, please forgive me. "You need to get a life." I'm sorry, I love you, please forgive me. "All those sad, pathetic letters." I'm lying, don't believe me, please don't believe me. I loved your letters, I kept them all and I cherish every one of them. "I prefer women with a little more experience." I don't mean it. I don't mean any of it. Knowing I'm the only man who has ever been inside of you makes me feel like a fucking king and the luckiest man alive. I'm sorry, I love you, please forgive me. "It doesn't get better when I come home to you. I hate this life." I'm lying! Every word is a lie. I love our life and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. I love you, I love you, I love you. — Tara Sivec

Let him tell them the truth. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. Let him say, "Be silent and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. Be silent and listen to the stones cry out.
Out of the silence let the only real news comes, which is sad news before it is glad news and that is fairy tale last of all. — Frederick Buechner

Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn. — Henry David Thoreau

Joy. The joy of my joy. There through everything. A shocking sense of vitality and beauty present in both happiness and in the midst of pain. The only thing I can think to compare this experience to is the experience of an excellent story - reading a great novel, say, or watching a great movie. The scene before you might be a happy one or a sad one. You might feel uplifted or you might feel heartbroken or you might feel afraid. But whatever you feel, you're still loving the story. Through prayer, I came to experience both pleasure and sorrow in something like that way. In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what. During — Andrew Klavan

I had a beautiful dream the other day. I was coming home from work and you were standing behind white picket fence trimming roses. You were dressed up all in white. We saw each other from afar and smiled. We kissed, got inside our home where our two beautiful children were playing and waiting for us. We all hugged and I kissed your belly because that's where our third child was. You were pregnant. Than all got blurry and white... I was awake. I was sad because my dream has ended but I was happy at the same time because that was the most beautiful and purest dream I have ever had. — J. Zima

When uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience, are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts: the same words, the same scenes are revolved over and over again, the same mood accompanies them - the end of the year finds them as much what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a recurrent series of movements. — George Eliot

I told them all, "If possible, I would be here with only you, forever. But I am a man who toils, and I must go where I must. We need currency for famous nightclubs, yes? I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love. So do not spleen me." But to be truthful, I was not even the smallest portion sad to go to Lutsk to translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. As I mentioned before, my life is ordinary. But I had never been to Lutsk, or any of the multitudinous petite villages that still endure after the war. I desired to see new things. I desired to experience volumes. And I would be electrical to meet an American. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Many people have failing relationships because they have not really fallen in love with each other, but they have fallen for the mental images they have created of one another. We assume we know our partner, we think about them nonstop, creating many different ideas of who they are, what they like, and how we will be together, then as soon as our partner does something that doesn't fit with our mental image of them, we become sad, upset, confused, or heart broken. Our partner did not cause our suffering; we caused it, through our false perceptions and mental images. — Joseph P. Kauffman

If you never tasted a bad apple, you would not appreciate a good apple. If you were never sad, you would not know how it feels to be happy. If you never had negative thoughts, you would not learn the power of positive thinking. You have to experience life to understand life. — Jeekeshen Chinnappen

... insanity is never reasonable. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Once this bubble of self-deception is burst and the mask that shielded her and others from what she wished to ignore is lifted, it is difficult for the woman to return to her life as it was. It has been said that "the discovery of a deceiving principle, a lying activity within us, can furnish an absolutely new view of all conscious life." This reawakened awareness changes the upscale abused woman's life forever. Suddenly, new choices stand before her. This can be a frightening and sad phase in therapy, a moment when the woman is grappling with a kaleidoscope of loss and potential future gain. Some women experience this period as the dark night of the soul. It can be sickening to face the truths one has chosen to ignore in hopes of maintaining the status quo. Even if the woman wishes to stay married, she will never perceive her life in the same way again. — Susan Weitzman

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Life was very sad if there were not - and unbearably so if one's experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic. — Mary Balogh

Regret comes in four tones that operate in unison to shape our lives. First, we regret the life that we lived, the decisions we made, the words we said in anger, and enduring the shame wrought from experiencing painful failures in work and love. Secondly, we regret the life we did not live, the opportunities missed, the adventures postponed indefinitely, and the failure to become someone else other than whom we now are. American author Shannon L. Alder said, 'One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.' Third, we regret that parts of our life are over; we hang onto nostalgic feelings for the past. When we were young and happy, everything was new, and we had not yet encountered hardship. As we age and encounter painful setbacks, we experience disillusionment and can no longer envision a joyous future. Fourth, we experience bitterness because the world did not prove to be what we hoped or expected it would be. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever . There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised ... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams — Katherine Mansfield

As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?
Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. [ ... ] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? [ ... ] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal. — Brandon W. Forbes

She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience. As if there were only one way things could go, the years leading you down a corridor to the room where your inevitable self waited--embryonic, ready to be revealed. How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed. — Emma Cline

It has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational paper or the cheap novel, or of that frothy mass of waste material which is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life
novelettes, serials, and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature. — Charles Webster Leadbeater

This lesson is, I suppose, a major reason I wrote this book: because along the way I've picked up the wisdom that bad things happen, and yet the sun still comes up the next day, and it's up to you to carry on living your life and keeping your setbacks in perspective. You also have to understand that on some level, these horrible and sad things happen to everyone; the mark of a man is not just how he survives it all but also what wisdom he's gained from the experience. — Martin Short

But life has a way of chopping people off at the knees, and he was no exception. Ten years of his life had been stolen from him. Now he wasn't wasting another minute. He wanted to experience everything he had missed, to eat and drink and read and work and fuck as he pleased. His dreams were smaller now, but they were still dreams, and he was going after them with everything he had. — Karen Robards

Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much - then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about.
But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal.
Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. — Tom Robbins

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book. — Alice Miller

When you awaken, you know that everything that occurs at the level of mind is illusory in nature and so you no longer believe in it as the truth of life. It is sometimes happy and sometimes sad, because it is a world of duality. You relax and accept the dual nature of the world of the mind and the world of experience within time. This will create balance within duality which will open the doorway to Oneness. — Leonard Jacobson

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all. — Vita Sackville-West

In other words, Shozaburo Takitani was now alone in the world. This was no great shock to him, however, nor did it make him feel particularly sad or miserable. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he felt that, eventually, life had to turn out more or less like this. Everyone ended up alone sooner or later. — Haruki Murakami

Oh, Youth may listen patiently,
While sad Experience tells her tale,
But Doubt sits smiling in his eye,
For ardent Hope will still prevail!
He hears how feeble Pleasure dies,
By guilt destroyed, and pain and woe;
He turns to Hope - and she replies,
Believe it not-it is not so! — Anne Bronte

Singapore and China did not have diplomatic relations at that time [1976]. Communism is banned in Singapore, and nobody could visit China without official approval. The Singapore government had prohibited travel there for fear that Singaporeans would be subverted and converted to the communist cause. . .The travel ban was lifted after Lee Kuan Yew's visit. He realised that nobody could experience life there and be seduced by their system. Indeed, they would better appreciate what Singapore offered. — Cheong Yip Seng

I have a theory that life is gathering the raw materials, and when we die, we get to make patterns out of our lives and relive them in whatever order we want. That way I can spend forever repeating the days when I was really happy, and never have to experience any of the sad days. So that's how you live a really great life. You make sure you have enough good days that you want to go back to. — Robyn Schneider

I knelt in front of life, folded my hands and prayed for some more time; there couldn't be any. My heart bled and so did my tearful eyes.
Time, they say, flies, but I saw it slowly passing by taking each of my tardy breaths with it as it walked out of my life ... — Sanhita Baruah

It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience
has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling
within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength.
We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians
can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas. — George Eliot

OLD MAN: In Africa, people are sadder about the death of an old man than about that of a newborn baby. The old man represented a wealth of experience that might have benefited the tribe, whereas the newborn baby had not lived and could not even be aware of dying. In Europe, people are sad about the newborn baby because they think he might well have done wonderful things if he had lived. On the other hand, they pay little attention to the death of the old man, who had already lived his life anyway. — Bernard Werber

Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr ... that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow. — David Foster Wallace

It's an honor and privilege to be next to the great mysteries, and that's what I get to do every day. Why are we here? How beautiful the Earth is. Whatever it is, large and small. There's so much that's beautiful and moving and sad, to experience that and find shapes for it, to deeply enter that meditative space. There's nothing like it. Everything else seems so pale. — Carole Maso

Nothing can change the past, including thought. However, dwelling on thoughts about the past does change our experience of the Now. When we drag the past into the present, everything else that belongs to the Now is marginalized and overlooked. All we see is the past or, more accurately, our story about it. All we can ever have of the past is our story about it, and that story is very unsatisfying. Our stories about the past don't feed our soul like the Now does. And worse, any story is usually a sad tale that keeps us caught up in negative feelings, and then those feelings become our current experience of life. — Gina Lake

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die. — Don DeLillo