150 Best of Sorrow and Joy Quotes

Joyful is part of this life, but so is sorrow. Here is our latest collection of sorrow and joy quotes that will keep you able to see this light.

Yes, life is also filled with colors and that makes it beautiful but also sometimes full of thorns. Sometimes they are the light that shines your path in some dark phases of our journey. Don’t lose the path, because along this path of darkness there’s always light waiting to be seen by your daunted hearts.

Browsing carefully our joyful list of sorrow and joy quotes below and find the quotes that resonate with you the most.

Contents

Khalil Gibran sorrow and joy quotes

I am the lover’s gift; I am the wedding wreath; I am the memory of a moment of happiness; I am the last gift of the living to the dead; I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow. — Khalil Gibran

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. — Khalil Gibran

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile. — Khalil Gibran

When you are sorrowful, look again. — Khalil Gibran

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the same well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? — Khalil Gibran

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. When you are joyous look deep into your heart and you will find that it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. — Khalil Gibran

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. — Kahlil Gibran

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. — Kahlil Gibran

Happiness and sorrow quotes

May you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human, and enough hope to make you happy. — Ella Joy Olsen

Grief – Happiness is to feel that one’s soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them. — Joseph Joubert

Time is the great eraser, both of sorrow and of joy. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it. — W. Somerset Maugham

Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. — Henri Barbusse

Life… how cruel it is! Nothing but tears and sorrow and despair! Not a moment of happiness! Not a moment of joy. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Each moment is a miracle encompassing everything: the joy and sorrow, the failure and success, the disappointment and happiness, the celebration and grief. — Kazuaki Tanahashi

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other. — Naguib Mahfouz

Nobody understands another’s sorrow, and nobody another’s joy. — Franz Schubert

Joy and sadness quotes

When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. — Johan Huizinga

Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them. — Erich Fromm

Joy and sadness come by turns. — sorrow and joy quotes by Walker Percy

I too have known joy and sadness, and, on the whole, I prefer joy. — Ashleigh Brilliant

Crying is cleansing. There’s a reason for tears, happiness or sadness. — sorrow and joy quotes by Dionne Warwick

And maybe that was how it was supposed to be. Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly. — Kristin Hannah

We never taste a perfect joy; our happiest successes are mixed with sadness. — Pierre Corneille

Be calm, be strong, be grateful, and become a lamp full of light, that the darkness of sorrows be annihilated, and that the sun of everlasting joy arise from the dawning-place of heart and soul, shining brightly. — Abdu’l-Bahá

We need to be angels for each other, to give each other strength and consolation. Because only when we fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it. — Henri Nouwen

The balance of joyful and sorrowful quotes in life

This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is… So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other. — Marilynne Robinson

The kindness sent from one compassionate soul to another during the time of loss of one held so dear allows the sorrow-filled heart to open wide, filling the space of emptiness that grief may have created with a renewed sense of peace, compassion, and love. — Molly Friedenfeld

As surely as the dark gives meaning to the dawn, so does pain give meaning to pleasure, and sorrow to joy. All that we love, all that we strive for, all that we relish, we know only by contrast. — Terryl Givens

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy. — Oscar Wilde

We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow. — Ray Bradbury

Life consists of two sides… light and dark. Joy and sorrow. Without a balance, one cannot fully experience a full and well-rounded life. — JoAnn Ross

Good and evil, joy and sorrow. All things strive for balance. And that means good and bad things end. — Amber Argyle

Feel joyful and sorrowful quotes in life

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know. — sorrow and joy quotes by James Baldwin

Life was a sorrowful throb of this matter teaching it anguish. Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire. Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow. — Sri Aurobindo

By changing our inner state of mind, we can change any suffering or hardship into a source of joy, regarding it as a means for forging and developing our lives. To turn even sorrow into a source of creativity. — Daisaku Ikeda

Only where there is sentient life can there be feelings of pleasure and pain, sorrow or joy. — sorrow and joy quotes by Max Heindel

Sorrow in joy, life and death, thorns on the rose. I knew then that I could not escape pain and torment any more than I could give up joy and beauty — sorrow and joy quotes by Cate Tiernan

feel joyful and sorrowful quotes in life 5

Therefore I live for today – certain of finding at sunrise guidance and strength for the way. Power for each moment of weakness, hope for each moment of pain, comfort for every sorrow, sunshine and joy after rain! — Billy Graham

They say that life is about balance. That it trades one sorrow for one joy and so forth until it finds some kind of harmony. Well, I want none of it. I’ve never been as dead as I was when I was balanced. I don’t want life to be contained, I want it unbound, inspired. Alive. — Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla

I think the source of our sorrow and the source of our joy are intimately entwined. Our sorrow is that we have forgotten who we are, we have forgotten we are one with that source of all life – absolutely indestructible, perfect, joyful. The source of our joy is when we remember that. — Richard Bach

Sorrow and joy quotes on friendship

Friendship multiplies joy and divides sorrow. — sorrow and joy quotes by Nicky Gumbel

Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow. It were almost to be wished that all true and faithful friends should expire on the same day. — Francois Fenelon

This was no friendship, to forsake your friend, to promise your support and at the end abandon him, this was sheer treachery. Friend follows friend to hell and blasphemy. When sorrow comes one’s true friends are found; In times of joy ten thousand gather round. — Farid Al-Din Attar

Friendship doubles your joys, and divides your sorrows. — sorrow and joy quotes by Euripides

Friends are an indispensable part of a meaningful life. They are the ones who share our burdens and multiply our blessings. A true friend sticks by us in our joys and sorrows. In good times and bad, we need friends who will pray for us, listen to us, and lend a comforting hand and an understanding ear when needed. — Beverly LaHaye

Each day holds a surprise. But only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it when it comes to us. Let’s not be afraid to receive each day’s surprise, whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy It will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity. — Henri Nouwen

The point of life isn’t to avoid pain. The point of life is to be alive! To feel things. That means the good and the bad. There’ll be pain. But also joy, and friendship and love. And it’s worth it, believe me. — John J. Stephens

In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends. — sorrow and joy quotes by Okakura Kakuzo

You will find joy, frustration and sorrow in your quest. Never forget that friendship and loyalty are more precious than riches. Happiness can be brief, but it knows no time in the land of dreams. — Brian Jacques

Short sorrow and joy quotes

The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. — Kevin Carter

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know. — James A. Baldwin

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. — Mark Twain

There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm. — John H. Vincent

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives. — Edvard Munch

From nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. — Hippocrates

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. — Arthur Koestler

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow. — Helen Keller

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. — William S. Burroughs

Laugh and the world laughs with you! — sorrow and joy quotes by Grant Morrison

There is a joy in sorrow which none but a mourner can know. — Jean Paul

Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows. — Betty Friedan

In joy and sorrow all are equal, Thus be guardian of all, as of yourself. — Shantideva

Sorrow is better than laughter; for, by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better. — Solomon

Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away. — Saadi

O God, take all our sorrows and use them to show us the nature of our joy. — Leslie Weatherhead

Love is the root of all joy and sorrow. — sorrow and joy quotes by Meister Eckhart

Ah, cruel fate, how swiftly joy and sorrow alternate! — Raimbaut De Vaqueyras

The real friend is he or she who can share all our sorrow and double our joys. — B.C. Forbes

Spiritual quotes on joy and sorrow

Joy and sorrow, when they are both lived in God, signify fruitfulness for the apostolate. — Adrienne Von Speyr

Your sorrow itself shall be turned into joy. Not the sorrow to be taken away, and joy to be put in its place, but the very sorrow which now grieves you shall be turned into joy. God not only takes away the bitterness and gives sweetness in its place, but turns the bitterness into sweetness itself. — Charles Spurgeon

How do you recover from an extraordinary loss? Take stock of the loved ones around you. Hug them, love them, and cherish them. When you appreciate the joys in your life, it makes sorrow that much easier to swallow. Every day is a new day. Hope floats, so let it rise. God is love. — Joseph Simmons

I know that nothing comes to pass but what God appoints; our fate is decreed, and things do not happen by chance, but every man’s portion of joy and sorrow is predetermined. — sorrow and joy quotes by Seneca the Younger

Where the glacier meets the sky, the land ceases to be earthly, and the earth becomes one with the heavens; no sorrows live there anymore, and therefore joy is not necessary; beauty alone reigns there, beyond all demands. — Halldór Laxness

We can experience joy in adverse circumstances by holding God’s benefits in such esteem that the recognition of them and meditation upon them shall overcome all sorrow. — John Calvin

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Understanding of our fellow human beings… becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feelings in joy and sorrow. — sorrow and joy quotes by Albert Einstein

Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us. — Starhawk

Joyful and sorrowful quotes lighten your soul

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage – and indeed perhaps more. — Pearl S. Buck

Sorrow or a wound can heal, allowing us to grow into our fullest, most compassionate identity, our greatness of heart. When we truly come to terms with sorrow, a great and unshakable joy is born in our heart. HEALING. — Jack Kornfield

Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one’s own. — sorrow and joy quotes by Fulton J. Sheen

Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps. Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps. — William Blake

A long while yet will you keep that great mother’s grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows. — sorrow and joy quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. — sorrow and joy quotes by Mark Twain

I have known good and evil, sin and virtue, right and wrong; I have judged and been judged; I have passed through birth and death, Joy and sorrow, heaven and hell; And in the end I realized that I AM in everything and everything is in me. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

Sorrowful and joyful quotes about love

People live for love. They kill for love; They die for love; They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It’s one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow. — Helen Fisher

For me, prayer is an upward leap of the heart, an untroubled glance towards heaven, a cry of gratitude and love which I utter from the depths of sorrow as well as from the heights of joy. — Therese Of Lisieux

The joy of love is too short, and the sorrow thereof, and what cometh thereof, dureth over long. — Thomas Malory

In joy or sorrow, health or sickness, prosperity or the reverse, the effort must still continue. One must rise after every fall and gradually acquire courage, faith, the will to succeed and the capacity to love. — Alexis Carrel

Joy and sorrow are the light and shade of life; without light and shade no picture is clear. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

The garden of love is green without limit and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy. Love is beyond either condition: without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh. — Rumi

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. — Rollo May

Love is the greatest magician in the universe; it can turn pain into pleasure, agony into power, sorrow into joy, and gloom into laughter. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. — Leo Tolstoy

I see beauty and pain. Joy and sorrow. I see the good and I see the bad… and I love it all. — A.L. Jackson

Take the joy and bear the sorrow quotes

Walk so that your footprints bear only the marks of peaceful joy and complete freedom. To do this you have to learn to let go. Let go of your sorrows, let go of your worries. That is the secret of walking meditation. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one’s own. — Fulton J. Sheen

The sea has been called deceitful and treacherous, but there lies in this trait only the character of a great natural power, which, to speak according to our own feelings, renews its strength, and, without reference to joy or sorrow, follows eternal laws which are imposed by a higher Power. — Wilhelm von Humboldt

From joy people are born; for joy they live; in joy they melt at death. Death is an ecstasy, for it removes the burden of the body and frees the soul of all pain springing from body identification. It is the cessation of pain and sorrow. — Paramahansa Yogananda

My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. — sorrow and joy quotes by Nikos Kazantzakis

There is no fire like passion. No crime like hatred, no sorrow like separation, no sickness like hunger, and no joy like the joy of freedom. — Gautama Buddha

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. — Mark Twain

Take the joy and bear the sorrow, looking past your hopes and fears: learn to recognize the measured dance that orders all our years. — Archilochus

Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows. — Roger Scruton

Life brings sorrows and joys quotes

There is the kiss of welcome and of parting, the long, lingering, loving, present one; the stolen, or the mutual one; the kiss of love, of joy, and of sorrow; the seal of promise and receipt of fulfillment. — Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Time passes cold and indifferent over us; it knows nothing of our joys or sorrows; it leads us with ice-cold hand deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. — Johann Ludwig Tieck

Life consists of two sides… light and dark. Joy and sorrow. Without a balance, one cannot fully experience a full and well-rounded life. — JoAnn Ross

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more. — Pearl S. Buck

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears. — Rene Descartes

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life brings sorrows and joys alike. It is what a man does with them – not what they do to him – that is the true test of his mettle. — Theodore Roosevelt

If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own … how much kinder, how much gentler he would be. — William Allen White

I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life, in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us. — Betty Smith

Quotations about joy and sorrow go hand in hand

There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. The folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world. — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Empathy is forgetting oneself in the joys and sorrows of another, so much so that you actually feel that the joy or sorrow experienced by another is your own joy and sorrow. Empathy involves complete identification with another. — Dada Vaswani

The day will come when you will review your life and be thankful for every minute of it. Every hurt, every sorrow, every joy, every celebration, every moment of your life will be a treasure to you, for you will see the utter perfection of the design. — Neale Donald Walsch

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon. — Joseph Conrad

Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. — J. R. R. Tolkien

Life is the coexistence of all opposite values. Joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, up and down, hot and cold, here and there, light and darkness, birth and death. All experience is by contrast, and one would be meaningless without the other. — Deepak Chopra

We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, that new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing. — Heinrich Heine

I hid myself within myself… and quietly wrote down all my joys, sorrows and contempt in my diary. — Anne Frank

Loss leaves us empty, but learn not to close your heart and mind in grief. Allow life to replenish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible, but new joys wait to fill the void. — Pam Brown

Joyful and sorrowful poetry quotes

My silent thoughts flow out in silent tears,
As the cool sprinkles quench the burning day;
And as they soothe it’s noises with sweet spray,
So do my tears melt and dissolve my fears.
It is after my brazen laughter of today,
After a weeping, and shutting of eyes to the years. — Henry Zolinsky

Where art thou, beloved tomorrow?
When young and old, and strong and weak,
Rich and poor, through joy and sorrow,
Thy sweet smiles we ever seek, in thy place;
Ah! well a day! We find the thing we fled today! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love is the centre and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things,
’tis the key of joy and sorrow,
and the recompense for all the ills that have been, or may be. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The hopes that, in my own heart sown,
And cherished by such sun and rain,
As Joy and transient Sorrow shed,
Have ripened to a harvest there. — Charlotte Brontë

Some are born for peace and joy
Some are born for sorrow
But only for a day as we
Shall not be here tomorrow. — Stevie Smith

Change the world, I know I won’t,
Enthralling as always I hope it remains,
A kaleidoscope of joy, sorrow and pain.
But my only wish as I take this jaunt,
Is for my words on you to impress upon,
A smile, a tear or even an angry frown. — Anurag Anand

Half my life is full of sorrow,
Half of joy, still fresh and new,
One of these lives is a fancy,
But the other one is true. — Adelaide Anne Procter

I know this feelings all will swoon the dream,
Dream as a solace filling the emptier year;
Ghost of a joy, feelings that only seem,
Remembered beauty bringing remembering tears. — Henry Zolinsky

More sorrowful and joyfulness quotes

The commonality in the human experience is the same. We have the same sorrows, and the same triumphs. Joy is joy is joy. — Oprah Winfrey

Forgive me, Spirit of my spirit, for this, that I have found it easier to read the mystery told in tears and understood Thee better in sorrow than in joy. — George William Russell

Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are condemned to an endless present, and we can never go back-the source of all our joy, and all our sorrow. — Alison Croggon

It is awesome to obtain possessions but, don’t be too eager for material possessions for the same material possessions that bring joy are the same possessions that bring sorrow and pain and also leave a big had I know on our minds — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I wonder if gratefulness is the bridge from sorrow to joy, spanning the chasm of our anxious striving. Freed from the burden of unbridled desires, we can enjoy what we have, celebrate what we’ve attained, and appreciate the familiar. For if we can’t be happy now, we’ll likely not be happy when. — Philip Gulley

Knowledge of the Enlightenment Cycle, of the ways that inner dimensions and nirvana work, lifts you far above the transient sorrows, pains, pleasures and joys that the unenlightened masses experience. — Frederick Lenz

Final thought

With these sorrow and joy quotes mentioned above, hope they give the gems of wisdom that will enrich you. Did you found your favorite? Would you like to add another sorrow and joy quotes here? Share in the comments section below!