Time & Perspective Quote by Bret Harte

“Never a tear bedims the eye that time and patience will not dry” is consolation with a spine. Bret Harte isn’t offering the saccharine promise that pain disappears; he’s insisting that grief is, at least partly, a weather system. You don’t argue with rain. You wait it out, you keep moving, you let the body and the days do their slow work. The line’s confidence comes from its clockwork phrasing: “Never” slams the door on exceptions, “bedims” makes sorrow feel physical and temporary (a film over sight), and the paired virtues - “time and patience” - turn healing into a practice rather than a miracle.

The subtext is quietly disciplinary. Patience is not just a comfort; it’s a mandate to endure without theatrics, to avoid making grief into identity. That fits Harte’s broader literary world: the American West he mythologized was full of precarious lives, abrupt losses, and communities that prized stoicism because survival demanded it. In that setting, mourning can’t be endless; the wagon still has to roll.

There’s also an economic idea hiding in the aphorism: emotion as something that can be “paid down” over time. It’s a line meant to steady the shaken, but it also gently polices the social boundary of acceptable sorrow. Harte’s genius here is the tact of it. He doesn’t tell you to stop crying. He promises your eyes won’t stay blurred forever - and in doing so, he makes resilience feel inevitable rather than aspirational.