Anguish Quotes

• Yoga is a way to freedom. By its constant practice, we can free ourselves from fear, anguish and loneliness.

  Indra Devi

  Freedom, Fear, Loneliness

  82 Copy quote

• What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Music, Beautiful, Heart

  38 Copy quote

• What makes loneliness an anguish
  Is not that I have no one to share my burden,
  But this:
  I have only my own burden to bear.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Loneliness, Being Alone, Bears

  "Markings". Book by Dag Hammarskjold, 1964.

  24 Copy quote

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• Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Life, Motivational

  92 Copy quote

• we do not die of anguish, we live on. We continue to suffer. We drink the cup drop by drop.

  George Sand

  Suffering, Cups, Drink

  George Sand (1977). “The Intimate Journal of George Sand”, Chicago Review Press

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• We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on.

  J. K. Rowling

  Life, Encouraging, Battle

  8 Copy quote

• Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide; anguish of body, none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receive.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Suicide, Health, Mind

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.240

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• the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Hope, Joy, Tides

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher STOWE (2016). “Collected Works (Complete and Illustrated Editions: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Queer Little Folks, The Chimney-Corner, ...)”, p.358, Harriet Beecher Stowe

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• If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

  Henri Matisse

  Happiness, Light, People

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, p.11, Univ of California Press

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• The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

  Virginia Woolf

  Happiness, Beauty, Laughter

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.573, Wordsworth Editions

  59 Copy quote

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• The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

  Lillian Smith

  Hurt, Grief, Heart

  "Killers of the Dream" by Lillian Smith, (pp. 25-26), 1994.

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• Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

  Ira Gershwin

  Change, Music, Encouragement

  12 Copy quote

• Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart.

  Pablo Neruda

  Love, Crush, Running

  Pablo Neruda (1986). “100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor”, University of Texas Press

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• The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

  William Styron

  Pain, Unimaginable, Visible

  William Styron (1990). “Darkness visible: a memoir of madness”, Random House Incorporated

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• At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, and everything made sense.

  Hermann Hesse

  Love, Dream, Sweet

  33 Copy quote

• Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.

  Michael Morpurgo

  Book, Kids, World

  13 Copy quote

• Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

  Balthus

  Art, Painting, Pleasure

  24 Copy quote

• I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

  Doris Lessing

  World, Kind, Feels

  8 Copy quote

• The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

  Georges Bataille

  Blood, Giving, Battle

  7 Copy quote

• What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Heart, Men, People

  7 Copy quote

• There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Love, Men, Suffering

  Miguel de Unamuno (2012). “Tragic Sense Of Life”, p.289, tredition

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• For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.

  Patrick Henry

  Truth, Honesty, Integrity

  Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, delivered 23 March 1775 at Henrico Parrish Church St, Richmond Virginia, Second Virginia Convention

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• Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Friendship, Loneliness, Being Alone

  "Markings". Book by Dag Hammarskjold, 1964.

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• Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Pain, Men, Long

  Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne (1981). “Art in Paris 1845-1862: salons and other exhibitions”

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• Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

  Hector Berlioz

  Writing, Ideas, Despair

  Hector Berlioz (1935). “Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865: comprising his travels in Germany, Italy, Russia, and England”

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