* Believe me, it is no time for words when the wounds are fresh and bleeding; no time for homilies when the lightning's shaft has smitten and the man lies stunned and stricken. Then let the comforter be silent; let him sustain by his presence, not by his preaching; by his sympathetic silence, not by his speech. "Afterward," when the storm is spent, he may venture to open his mouth; "afterward," when the morn has dawned, he may seek "to justify the ways of God to man;" for " afterward" the sufferer will be prepared to hear, and "afterward" the sufferer himself may be able to extract sweetness from bitterness, music from mourning, songs from sorrow, and " the peaceable fruit of righteousness " from the root of wretchedness and woe.
= George C. Lorimer, in Isms Old and New: Winter Sunday Evening Sermon-series for 1880-81 (1881), Ch. 6: Pessimism, or The Mystery of Human Suffering, "Unwise Comforters", p. 147

* Le bonheur est salutaire pour le corps, mais c'est le chagrin qui développe les forces de l'esprit.
= Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
o Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1927), Vol. VII: Le temps retrouvé (The Past Recaptured), Ch. III: "An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes".

 * A genuine faith lifts us above the bitterness of grief; a sense of Christ's living presence takes away all unbearable loneliness even when we are most alone. In our darkest hours, to know that our lost friend is still living, still loving us, still ours, in the highest and best sense, must be unspeakably consoling.
= Arthur Henry Kenney, p. 27.

* The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
= Oliver Wendell Holmes, p. 27.

* But, Madam, let your grief be laid aside,
And let the fountain of your tears be dry'd,
In vain they flow to wet the dusty plain,
Your sighs are wafted to the skies in vain,
Your pains they witness, but they can no more,
While Death reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore.
o Phillis Wheatley, "To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name of Avis, aged one Year." st. 2, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)

 

* I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.
= Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Grief, l. 1 (1844).