Melancholy Quotes - Page 15

• The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Religious, Atheism, Doubters

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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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• 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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• 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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• As a bit of loner, prone to melancholy, with a questionable sexuality, I found great solace in the words of-Dylan, Joni, John Prine and Leonard Cohen. The darker the better.

  Jill Sobule

  Loner, Sexuality, Found

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Immanuel Kant

  Sublime, Superb

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• Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.

  Jonathan Swift

  Wall, Real, Reflection

  Jonathan Swift, Thomas Sheridan, John Nichols (1808). “The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D. ...: With Notes, Historical and Critical”, p.304

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Each picture with its particular environment and unique personal relationships is a world unto itself - separate and distinct. Picture makers lead dozens of lives - a life for each picture. And, by the same token, they perish a little when each picture is finished and that world comes to an end. In this respect it is a melancholy occupation.

  John Huston

  Unique, World, Occupation

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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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• 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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• What e'er you are
  That in this desert inaccessible,
  Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
  Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.

  William Shakespeare

  Time, Desert, Shade

  William Shakespeare (2016). “The Complete William Shakespeare Collection (Illustrated)”, p.802, Tyché

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• 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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• Well, I'm drawn to stuff that is darker. I will probably do a version of Jane Austen at some point because her books are really well known. Unfortunately they've been parodied to death, but they're so well known that I feel like I should approach it and I think I have an idea that will definitely spin it in a different way. There's melancholy and sadness around the edges. I haven't read all of her books, but it seems they often have... essentially happy endings?

  Robert Sikoryak

  Book, Sadness, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I like to express true emotions under the cover of melancholy: It includes fulfilment and pain, which describes human existence.

  Volker Bertelmann

  Pain, Emotion, Existence

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I've once gotten in trouble with certain gay activists because I'm not gay enough! I am a morose homosexual. I'm melancholy. Gay is the last adjective I would use to describe myself. The idea of being gay, like a little sparkler, never occurs to me. So if you ask me if I'm gay, I say no.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Gay, Ideas, Lasts

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Books come at my call and return when I desire them; they are never out of humor and they answer all my questions with readiness. Some present in review before me the events of past ages; others reveal to me the secrets of Nature. These teach me how to live, and those how to die; these dispel my melancholy by their mirth, and amuse me by their sallies of wit. Some there are who prepare my soul to suffer everything, to desire nothing, and to become thoroughly acquainted with itself. In a word, they open the door to all the arts and sciences.

  Petrarch

  Art, Book, Past

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• The frequency of disastrous consequences in compound fracture, contrasted with the complete immunity from danger to life or limb in simple fracture, is one of the most striking as well as melancholy facts in surgical practice.

  Joseph Lister

  Science, Simple, Practice

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• Kevin Kline gives a master class in acting. He finds every nuance of mirth and melancholy in this wonder of a role and rides it to glory. You can't take your eyes off him.

  Peter Travers

  Eye, Class, Giving

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