Sorrow Is Knowledge They Who Know

From Act I, Scene 1 of Manfred (1817), spoken by the guilt-ridden Count Manfred in a Gothic gallery at midnight. Byron wrote the play during his first winter in Switzerland at the Villa Diodati in 1816–17, a season of shared dark Romanticism that also produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The line draws on Ecclesiastes 1:18 ("in much wisdom is much grief") and on the myth of the Tree of Knowledge, suggesting that heightened awareness of the world's tragedy is the inescapable burden of the most perceptive minds.