Melancholy Quotes - Page 12

• During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Country, Book, Autumn

  Edgar Allan Poe (1927). “Tales by Edgar Allan Poe”, p.128, Dimitrios Spyridon Chytiris

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• Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Poetry, Tone

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works”, p.148, Lulu.com

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• For many years I was the youngest among my mathematical friends. It makes me melancholy to realize that I now have become the oldest in most groups of scientists.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Years, Groups, Realizing

  "Adventures of a Mathematician" by Stanislaw Ulam, Third Edition, (p. 37), 1991.

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• It is a melancholy but an undoubted fact, that, even in the most thriving countries, part of the population annually dies of mere want. Not that all who perish from want absolutely die of hunger; though this calamity is of more frequent occurrence than is generally supposed.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Country, Population, Want

  Jean Baptiste Say (1827). “A treatise on political economy: or, The production, distribution and consumption of wealth”, p.331

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• All my films have always been released in the autumn, maybe because they're more melancholy to people.

  Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

  Autumn, People, Film

  Source: collider.com

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• I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth,
  forgone all custom of exercise.

  William Shakespeare

  Exercise, Mirth, Important Hamlet

  William Shakespeare, Alan Durband (1987). “Hamlet”, p.116, Nelson Thornes

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• The Future is distant, like the Past, and therefore sentimental. The mere element "Past" must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind, is sentimental.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Past, Mind, Weakness

  Wyndham Lewis (1914). “Blast”, Kraus Reprint Corp.

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• One of the most melancholy consequences of this habit of deferring to other nations, and to other systems, is the fact that it causes us to undervalue the high blessings we so peculiarly enjoy; to render us ungrateful towards God, and to make us unjust to our fellow men, by throwing obstacles in their progress towards liberty.

  James F. Cooper

  Men, Blessing, Ungrateful

  "A Letter to His Countrymen". Book by James F. Cooper, 1834.

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• As in our lives so also in our studies, it is most becoming and most wise, so to temper gravity with cheerfulness, that the former may not imbue our minds with melancholy, nor the latter degenerate into licentiousness.

  Pliny the Elder

  Wise, Mind, May

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• Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I've studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they're just different names for loneliness. That's what lets the darkness in. That's what you have to fight.

  Andrew Pyper

  Loneliness, Fighting, Names

  Andrew Pyper (2014). “The Demonologist: A Novel”, p.26, Simon and Schuster

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• Haiti is the best cure against melancholy; it is also the most creative place for me to be. My productivity has increased enormously since I moved to Haiti. That's where I write my stories, develop my ideas and write nonstop, so it's a productive time, not a sleepy time.

  Jørgen Leth

  Writing, Ideas, Creative

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved.

  Osamu Dazai

  Love, Lying, Fall

  Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.47, New Directions Publishing

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• I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness.

  Pliny the Elder

  Beautiful, Thinking, World

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• There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

  Honore de Balzac

  Book, Thinking, Skeletons

  Honore de Balzac (2009). “Eugenie Grandet”, p.5, The Floating Press

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• Venerate four characters: the sanguine who has checked volatility and the rage for pleasure; the choleric who has subdued passion and pride; the phlegmatic emerged from indolence; and the melancholy who has dismissed avarice, suspicion and asperity.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Character, Passion, Pride

  "Aphorisms on Man" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, (c. 1788).

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• Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Stars, Pride, Water

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• Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Joy, Suffering, Paper

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• It is a sad and very melancholy scene, which must strike everyone who knows and feels that we also have to pass one day through the valley of the shadow of death, and “que la fin de la vie humaine, ce sont des larmes ou des cheveux blancs.” What lies beyond this is a great mystery that only God knows, but He has revealed absolutely through His word that there is a resurrection of the dead.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Lying, Shadow Of Death, One Day

  Vincent van Gogh, Mark Roskill (1997). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, p.112, Simon and Schuster

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• I drove in last night,' he said. 'I couldn't sleep, it was too hot. So I went outside. I was feeling melancholy. Then I danced with a beautiful girl, and I felt better. What's your story?

  Judy Blundell

  Beautiful, Girl, Sleep

  Judy Blundell (2010). “What I Saw And How I Lied”, p.52, Scholastic Inc.

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• Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Dark, Tree, Leaving

  Cheryl Strayed (2012). “Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found”, p.107, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  Girl, Sweet, Morning

  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (2013). “Carmilla: A Critical Edition”, p.50, Syracuse University Press

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• So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.

  Dodie Smith

  England

  Dodie Smith (2003). “I Capture the Castle”, p.370, St. Martin's Press

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• What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

  Henry Miller

  Night, Symphony, Years

  Henry Miller (1945). “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”, [New York] : New directions

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• Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.

  Robert Burton

  Overcoming

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• I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

  David Foster Wallace

  Silly, Sadness, Two

  David Foster Wallace (2004). “The Broom of the System: A Novel”, p.183, Penguin

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