Saturday, April 21, 2012

The Saddest Words!

I don't know who compiled the following but it's interesting. What do YOU think are the saddest words? I read the obits (am in that age group!) and I have concluded that some of the saddest words I read are "No known survivors." I can't imagine not having family to mourn my passing! What has happened in a person's life that he/she has no one to weep for him/her?

Poet T.S. Eliot: "The saddest word in the English language is, of course, 'saddest.'"

Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II: "But."

Writer John Dos Passos quoted John Keats: "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell."

Psychiatrist Karl Menninger: "Unloved."

Statesman Bernard M. Baruch: "Hopeless."

President Harry Truman quoted John Greenleaf Whittier: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"

Alexandra Tolstoi: "The saddest word in all languages, which has brought the world to its present condition, is 'atheism.'"

"Put all of these answers together and you have a faint picture of a soul without Christ. I think of that word which Keats used so dramatically--'forlorn.' It is the English form of the Dutch word verloren, which means 'lost.' But the Word of God, through the apostle Paul, gives the ultimate description, 'without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world' (Eph. 2:12)."

Dr. Menninger's word "unloved" causes us to wonder why a person is unloved. We must be loving to be beloved. Unfortunately, we have too many homeless in our city. Not long ago our paper had an article about the homeless and how they loved each other. They were there for each other and, when something terrible happened, they were a grand support system. It puts the rest of us to shame, doesn't it?

So what do YOU think are the saddest words?

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