Grief

"This great calamity has surely come by the force of fate, or by chance, for the destruction of this dynasty, O charioteer.

Grief destroys courage;

but grief, even the most subtle, when it falls cannot be borne.

Do not let your soul be pressed too hard by grief, whether a sickness lying upon you weighs you down or some other hardship befalls;

We must not, then, make our consolation against each of them—for that is an endless business, and life is full of grief—but, having wholly removed the passion from the soul and judged this firmly, that the man of sense ought not to grieve about anything, thereafter to live as a free man;

And not merely to yield to the rush of the mind, but to contrive in addition certain outward things—such as black raiment and the wringing of hands and low seats—so that by all these one is in a manner compelled never to let the mind withdraw from its grief, but always to remember and to grieve, knowing full well that there will be some release from this and that there will not forever appear some …

to pass even a single day apart from grief and fear and such passions.

He was overwhelmed with grief [ penthos] for the death of his son Antinoos, who had been the first man killed by Odysseus, so he said, weeping bitterly, "My friend, this man has done the Achaeans great wrong.

When Odysseus saw him so worn, so old and full of sorrow [ penthos], he stood still under a tall pear tree and began to weep.

A dark cloud of sorrow [ akhos] fell upon Laertes as he listened.

To that point I must turn all my consolation, whence the true force of a mother's grief arises:

Since on my own account, dearest mother, you have nothing to drive you to endless tears, it follows that the causes belonging to you are what goad you.

and therefore our ancestors granted to women a space of ten months for mourning their husbands, that by a public ordinance they might settle the matter of the stubbornness of a woman's grief.

Just as all vices sink in deep unless they are crushed while they are rising, so these sorrowful, wretched feelings, raging against themselves, end by feeding at last upon their own bitterness, and grief becomes the perverse pleasure of an unhappy mind.

And that you may know this is not natural—to be broken by grief—the same bereavement wounds women more than men, barbarians more than the men of a peaceable and cultivated nation, the unlearned more than the learned.

Poverty, grief, ambition, one man feels in one way and another in another, according as habit has stained him, and a preconceived opinion about things that are not to be feared renders him weak and impatient of the dreadful.

and therefore that which must be done so often ought to be done by us with moderation, and, looking back upon how great a store of sorrowful things hangs over us behind, we ought, if not to make an end of tears, at least to keep them in reserve.

For unless reason puts an end to our tears, Fortune will not.

Therefore let us spare ourselves the tears that profit nothing;