43+ Irresistibly Grief Observed Quotes That Will Unlock Your True Potential

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer.

But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give.

For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.

The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.

Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.

’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed.

There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.