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Without diversion no joy, with diversion no sadness.

The very thing which is now the cause of thy great grief ought to have brought thee tranquillity.

This only will I say, that the most crushing of misfortune's burdens is, that as soon as a charge is fastened upon the unhappy, they are believed to have deserved their sufferings.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be

In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel.

Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out,--I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends.

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind.

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

Presently, after this was at an end, my mother died, and I was left at liberty to mourn her loss awhile.

The affectionate heart of my aunt, Catherine Porten, bewailed a sister and a friend; but my poor father was inconsolable, and the transport of grief seemed to threaten his life or his reason.

The unity of God preserves a unity in men--that is, a perpetual sympathy between man and man--which sympathy we must be subject to, if not in our joys, yet in our griefs.

Once I wished not to live, but the faculty of life seems to have sprung up in me again, from under the crushing foot of heavy grief.

In our sorrow we see the rough side of the stuff; in our joys the smooth; and who shall say that when the taffeta is turned the most silk may not be in the sorrows?

If sorrow in its reaction makes us think of our friends, let my name come among the list of yours to you, and with it let the thought come that I am not the coldest and least sincere.

There is only one event in my life which never loses its bitterness; which comes back on me like a retreating wave, going and coming again, which was and is my grief--I never had but one brother who loved and comprehended me.

When gone from hence, may nobody think of me again, except when one or two may think perhaps how I loved them

You have summoned me in my weakness; you must sustain me by your strength.

The absolute power of this distant old master had touched my young spirit with but the point of its cold, cruel iron, and left me something to brood over after the play and in moments of repose.

I had the grief of neglected chances of escape to brood over

Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families.

Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart

A gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting solitude and remoteness, took conscious form in his soul.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?