Barbara Alice Mann

Westerners are fond of the saying Life isn't fair. Then, they end in snide triumphant: So get used to it! What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child's budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, Life isn’t fair, and her response will be: Then make it fair!

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

What is it that the child has to teach?

The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness.

The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.

Erich Fromm

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in misery, the time that you were happy.

Cat Stevens

I always knew I would look back on the times I cried, and laugh; but I never thought I would look back on the times I laughed, and cry.

Carl Jung

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Abraham Lincoln

In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement.