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Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn;
And he alone is bless'd who ne'er was born.
--
Solomon on the Vanity of the World, book iii, line 240; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 

Matthew Prior

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“Where exactly do you suffer?” the physician asks the patient. “Alas, dear doctor, everywhere,” he answers. “But how are you suffering?” continues the physician, “so that I can diagnose the illness.” No one asks me this, nor do I need it. I know very well how I suffer-I suffer sympathetically. This is exactly the suffering that is able to shake me deeply. Even though I am depressingly and sincerely convinced that I am good for nothing, as soon as there is danger I really have the strength of a lion. When I suffer autopathetically, I am able to stake all my will, and depressed as I am and depressingly brought up, the appalling finds me all the more prepared for what is even more appalling. But when I suffer sympathetically, I have to use all my power, all my ingenuity, in the service of the appalling to reproduce the other’s pain, and that exhausts me. When I myself suffer, my understanding thinks of grounds for comfort, but when I suffer sympathetically, I dare not believe a single one of them, for I cannot, of course, know the other one so accurately as I can know whether the presuppositions are present that are the condition for its effectiveness. When I suffer autopathetically, I know where I am; I place signs along the road of suffering so that I can have something to hold to, but when I suffer sympathetically I go astray, for I cannot really know where the other one actually is, and at every moment I must start all over again, prepared at the next moment to be able to think an even more appalling possibility, the dreadfulness of which I must endure in order not to shirk anything.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

'Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more;
I mourn, but you woodlands I mourn not for you!
For spring is returning your charms to restore,
Perfumed with fresh fragrance and glittering with dew.
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn,
Kind nature the embryo blossom shall save;
But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?

 

James Beattie

 

To all who mourn a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a friend — I can only offer you the gratitude of a nation, for your loved one served his country with distinction and honor." ... "Your men are under a different command now, one that knows no rank, only love; knows no danger, only peace, May God bless them all.

 

George H. W. Bush

 

We must delight in each other, make other's conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

 

John Winthrop

 

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins