Samuel Johnson Sorrow Quotations

Sorrow is the rust of the soul and activity will cleanse and brighten it.

Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it.

The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

To have gold is to be in fear, and to want it to be sorrow.

I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.

For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

But though it cannot be reasonable not to gain happiness for fear of losing it, yet it must be confessed, that in proportion to the pleasure of possession, will be for some time our sorrow for the loss.

The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.

Bashfulness may sometimes exclude pleasure, but seldom opens any avenue to sorrow or remorse.

Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity; a combination of a passion which all endeavor to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest.

Social sorrow loses half its pain.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.

No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.