Melancholy Quotes - Page 4

• It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

  Charles Dickens

  Truth, Greatness, Men

  Bleak House ch. 28 (1853)

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• When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away?

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Love, Art, Betrayal

  The Vicar of Wakefield ch. 29 (1766)

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• Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end...

  Karel Capek

  Triumph, Literature, Might

  "Karel Čapek: Life and Work". Book by Ivan Klima, 2002.

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• Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

  George Santayana

  Art, History, Poor

  Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 8

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• But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

  George Saintsbury

  Century, Whole

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.162, tredition

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• In such a diversity it was impossible I should be disposed to melancholy.

  Daniel Boone

  Diversity, Impossible, Should

  Daniel Boone, Francis Lister Hawks (1996). “Daniel Boone: His Own Story”, p.6, Applewood Books

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• Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Mean, Dark, Feelings

  Translated in Music Journal, p. 37, September, 1965.

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• I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Sweet, Years, Vision

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1871). “Poetical Works”, p.141

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• I was creative before I started meditating, but I had, looking back, a weakness. I wasn't self-assured. I had a little bit of melancholy. I had a lot of anger for my situations in life, and I would take this out on my first wife.

  David Lynch

  Situations In Life, Self, Wife

  "His Mission to Change the World Through Meditation". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 9, 2014.

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• I am an avid follower of the news, and sometimes you just can't take any more war, any more disasters, and you want to remind yourself there's beauty in the world. I wanted to show a more poetic side to my work. It was all about... a feeling of sadness, but in a cinematic kind of way. I find beauty in melancholy.

  Alexander McQueen

  War, Sadness, Avid

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• Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sad, Knives, Orlando

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.28, Oxford University Press, USA

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• There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Happiness, Shadow, Lap

  Michel de Montaigne (1872). “All the Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne”, p.567

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• One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Deaf, Realism, Music Is

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• I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  World, Abandoned

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• At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Art, Essentials, Heart

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• The most melancholy thing about human nature, is, that a man may guide others into the path of salvation, without walking in it himself; that he may be a pilot, and yet a castaway.

  Prince Augustus William of Prussia

  Men, Hypocrisy, May

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• There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Black, Midst

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.84, Graphic Arts Books

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• So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!

  Charles Dickens

  Great Expectations, Strange, Familiar

  Charles Dickens (2016). “British Classics: Great Expectations”, p.52, The Planet

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• The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Running, Stupid, People

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• The Lady: a fluty voice, sensible shoes, a melancholy sense of living by rules few still remember.

  Mason Cooley

  Class, Shoes, Voice

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• I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.

  Virginia Heffernan

  Depression, Thinking, People

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• There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

  Charles Kuralt

  Wind, Sorrow, Grass

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• Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

  Mark Twain

  Feet, Long, Yards

  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ch. 2 (1876)

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• The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

  Charles Lamb

  Men, Recipes, Dull

  Letter to Thomas Manning, 15 February 1802 (quoting from 'The Londoner', no. 1), in E. Marrs (ed.) 'The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb' vol. 2 (1976) p. 57

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• Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

  Thomas Gray

  Humble, Earth, Lap

  "ElegyWritten in a Country Churchyard" l. 117 (1751)

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