What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.
But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
Words are most malignant, the most treacherous possession of mankind. They are saturated with the sorrows of all time.
I can bear my own sorrows, but the sorrows arising from the calamities visiting Islam and Muslims have crushed me. I feel each blow delivered to the Muslim world as delivered first to my own heart.
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
All we will ever know and share about love, humility, compassion, and sacrifice - the secrets that will reveal and then resolve old sorrows - awaits us within ourselves.
We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.
The entire world is a witness to the phenomenon that sorrows keep away from the kindhearted and compassionate.
