Melancholy Quotes - Page 13

• Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

  Alexander Smith

  Coffins, Reputation, Glory

  Alexander Smith (1863). “Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.21

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• To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.

  Andre Gide

  Inspirational, Happiness, Struggle

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• The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Sadness, Misery, Values

  Maurice Maeterlinck (2015). “The Treasure of the Humble: Works of Maeterlinck”, p.36, 谷月社

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• Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sadness, Reality, Wind

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

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• Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.

  Immanuel Kant

  Sublime, Superb

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• Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

  William Shakespeare

  Nurse, Frenzy

  William Shakespeare (1851). “Dictionary of Shakespearian quotations: Exhibiting the most forcible passages illustrative of the various passions, affections and emotions of the human mind”, p.230

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• Good-humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Angel, Gay, Sight

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• And that dismal cry rose slowly And sank slowly through the air, Full of spirit's melancholy And eternity's despair; And they heard the words it said,- "Pan is dead! great Pan is dead! Pan, Pan is dead!"

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Air, Rose, Spirit

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1871). “The Poetical Works of”

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• Work saves us from melancholy. Pleasure exposes us to it.

  Mason Cooley

  Work, Pleasure

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• Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures--but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.

  Laurence Sterne

  Adventure, Knights, Soul

  Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New, Geoffrey Day (2006). “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts”, p.156, Hackett Publishing

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• My curiosity to see the melancholy spectacle of the executions was so strong that I could not resist it, although I was sensible that I would suffer much from it.... I got upon a scaffold near the fatal tree so that I could clearly see all the dismal scene.... I was most terribly shocked, and thrown into a very deep melancholy.

  James Boswell

  Death, Strong, Tree

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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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• Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm indignation, together with ignorance, are the true sources of enthusiasm.

  David Hume

  Ignorance, Pride, Together

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• Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.

  David Hume

  Spring, Intelligent, Secret

  David Hume (1788). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.374

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• Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Hands, Greek, Islam

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• How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

  Fanny Burney

  Real, Reading, Writing

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I kept.. ..returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.

  William Baziotes

  Wall, Painting, Ancient

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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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• To render my works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid melancholy.

  Hector Berlioz

  Vehemence, Morbid, Combination

  Hector Berlioz (1935). “Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865: comprising his travels in Germany, Italy, Russia, and England”

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• They say that no one's gonna play this on the radio. They said the melancholy blues were dead and gone. But only songs like these played in minor keys, keep those memories holding on.

  Billy Joel

  Song, Memories, Keys

  Song: Baby Grand, Album: The Bridge, 1986

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