Top 72 Somber Quotes & Sayings

I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music?... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

When we record a song, like 'Bedside Manner,' it's important that the next time I write a somber, mid-tempo song that we don't treat it the same way.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

I’m not suggesting the world is good, that life is easy, or that any of us are entitled to better. But please, isn’t this the kind of thing you talk about in somber tones, in the afternoon, with some degree of hope and maybe even a handful of strategies?

Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.

I like guitar sounds to be a little somber.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

The sun was slowly setting in the west, casting golden beams of light into the somber old room.

Mourning doesn't always mean zen, mourning doesn't always mean somber, mourning can just be a celebration of a life of people. It's not always about wearing black and listening to a Sarah McLachlan song.

I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.

Nothing beats a haunted moonlit night on All Hallows Eve.... And on this fatal night, at this witching time, the starless sky laments black and unmoving. The somber hues of an ominous, dark forest are suddenly illuminated under the emerging face of the full moon.

Memento mori and obey the Lord. Art and religion love the somber chord.

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

If our spiritual past is somber and painful, let us try to simplify it, by acquiring true dedications that will assist us through the harsh climb of redemption. If we do not, today, have a determined bond with the wealth of injustice, we had it yesterday, and it becomes indispensable that we take advantage of time for our own individual readjustment before the Divine Justice.

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians-when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.

It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.

Those circumstances, which to the dim eye of Jacob's faith wore a hue so somber, were at that very moment developing and perfecting the events which were to shed around the evening of his life the halo of a glorious and cloudless sunset.

God in his harmony has equal ends For cedar that resists and reed that bends; For good it is a woman sometimes rules, Holds in her hand the power, and manners, schools, And laws, and mind; succeeding master proud, With gentle voice and smiles she leads the crowd, The somber human troop.

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.

This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks.

The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

From somber, serious sullen saints, save us, O Lord.

The real me is this deep, kind of somber person. I can't really help that.

It doesn't have to be somber to be sacred.

I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.

Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber.

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another.

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions.

I feel like 'Work' was a really good song for people to get to know me, as it's obviously biographical. With 'Bounce,' I wanted to make sure people know there's a fun side to me as well as the somber and serious one.

So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber, and we want to say, 'Hey, we're real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.'

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

We have two lives about us,Two worlds in which we dwell,Within us and without us,Alternate Heaven and Hell:-Without, the somber Real,Within, our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal.

I've known Al Franken for over 20 years. He is my friend. He was on the floor of the Senate announcing his resignation. I sat just a few feet away from him. He said it was the worst day in his political life. It was a somber feeling. It was a reality.

A lot of times we associate Greenpeace and climate change and shrinking polar caps with heavy-handed, weighty material. It's somber stuff. But with Funny Or Die we thought we could put an interesting take on it. Make it a little more palatable, especially for young people who tune into the website.

Even colors were important to me. If it was a somber scene, the colors were muted and dark. If it was a happy or seductive scene, the colors were brighter.

I think it's cool to play characters who are very joke-y and yet you can show a total serious, very somber side to them. You don't normally get that in a film - and in a [film] series especially. To be able to do that was really cool.

Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.

I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards [...] and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.

I really love a lot of Japanese music, like Ryuichi Sakamoto and this guy I got really into, Tatsuro Yamashita. When I was a little younger, I thought synthesizers meant Kraftwerk, cold, robotic, weird, Autobahn. But these guys are having a lot of fun on these things. Sometimes. Sometimes it's very somber. They could go either way.

I don't think I'm a particularly somber human being.

I don't really connect with super-sad, somber songs.

Leisure for reverie, gay or somber, does much to enrich life.

Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.

It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.

To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.

The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.

Traditional spirituality often made pleasure, joy, good feelings. the things to overcome. It said you couldn't just indulge in your desires; that would be selfish. Anyone who has been in a spiritual community recognizes the dangers of this kind of joyless spirituality, where everything is somber and heavy and serious. We recognize that as kind of a trap, a false path.

There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent.

Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

He pulled her back, off balance so that she fell against him, and he took her face in his two hands and held it very still while his eyes looked down into hers. Somber, truthful, painfully honest. "I love you, Chloe," he said. "Which is the most dangerous thing I could do.

Every true-crime thing you see goes in with that kind of ominous music and low lighting, so to be able to talk about these things but not have to feel somber about it and not feel guilty that you're not feeling somber about it - I think that's what appeals to me.

Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

The most important thing about a TV set is to get it back against something and not out in the middle of a room where it's like a somber fellow making electronic judgments on you.

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.