Sadness Quotes:
We often speak about happiness, but we rarely see or hear quotes on sadness or talk about it directly.
Happiness is often believed to be the state we arrive at when we develop one or more of the following: the strength of character to stay resilient in the face of external hardship, build a life of which we’re proud, find something that gives us purpose, and behave in ways that align with what we believe to be ethical and moral.
However, sadness has a practical use in our search for happiness. If we spend the time to look internally and see what makes us sad, what being sad feels like, sit with the emotion, and dig at the root of those feelings to resolve them, we can make sure that when we are happy, we stay happy.
This may all seem counterintuitive, but thinking about sadness can improve our mental health.
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Sadness helps us acknowledge and process our emotions. When we allow ourselves to think about being sad, we give ourselves permission to feel our negative emotions and work through them in a healthy way. This is something that people often avoid. Suppressing negative emotion can be detrimental to our ability to process emotion and prevent us from working on areas of ourselves that are insecure or vulnerable.
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Building our emotional resilience: When we allow ourselves to experience and process difficult emotions, we are building our emotional resilience. This means that we are better able to cope with and manage difficult emotions in the future. By developing emotional resilience, we can become more adaptable and better equipped to deal with life’s challenges.
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Developing our empathy and compassion: When we think about our own sadness, we may also develop a greater understanding of the experiences of other people who are going through similar challenges and emotions. This can help us develop empathy and compassion for others, which can be incredibly valuable for our mental health and overall wellbeing.
Sometimes a single quote for sadness, or a short saying about sadness is all we need to look at it differently. On that note, here are some of the best sadness quotes
Quotes on Sadness:
“Tears are words that need to be written.”
– Paulo Coelho
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
– Carl Jung
“Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable… then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.”
“The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.”
– Jim Rohn
“What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgments about these things.”
“Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”
– Osho Rajneesh
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
– Eckhart Tolle
I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don’t think that’s only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.
– Kevin Bacon
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
– Epictetus
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
– William Shakespeare
“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Some people appear to be happy, but they simply don’t give the matter much thought. Others make plans: I’m going to have a husband, a home, two children, a house in the country. As long as they’re busy doing that, they’re like bulls looking for the bullfighter: they react instinctively, they blunder on, with no idea where the target is. They get their car, sometimes they even get a Ferrari, and they think that’s the meaning of life, and they never question it. Yet their eyes betray the sadness that even they don’t know they carry in their soul. Are you happy?”
– Paulo Coelho
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
– Seneca
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“Sadness does not last forever when we walk in the direction of that which we always desired.”
– Paulo Coelho
“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.”
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it.”
– Seneca
Conclusion:
Whether you’re sad because you’re having a bad day, or you’re experiencing chronic sadness, or you’re trying to help someone else who is feeling sad, hopefully these sad quotes and sayings on sadness can help reframe some of those thoughts and allow you to look at them in a different way and even alleviate some of your suffering.