Melancholy Quotes - Page 20

• I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

  Hermann Hesse

  Disappointment, Suffering, Vex

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Peter Camenzind: A Novel”, p.100, Macmillan

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• Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .

  Timothy Keller

  Prayer, Self, Giving

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• The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

  Marsilio Ficino

  Passion, Journey, Love Is

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• For me work is an absolute necessity, indeed I can't really drag it out, I take no more pleasure in anything than in work, that's to say, pleasure in other things stops immediately and I become melancholy if I can't get on with the work.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Pleasure, Drag, Impressive

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• Thinking it selfish to dwell on her own sufferings, when in the midst of wretches, who had not only lost all that endears life, but their very selves, her imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human corruption.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Selfish, Thinking, Imagination

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2012). “Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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• As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

  Victor Hugo

  Twilight, Joy, Being Sad

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• All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

  Martin McDonagh

  Black, Balance, Comedy

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• A few melancholy birds were pipping and wailing, until the round red sun sank slowly into the western shadows; then an empty silence fell

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Silence, Bird, Shadow

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.137, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• One ought to avoid all unnecessary worry and exciting thoughts, and to cultivate a firm tranquility of mind. Melancholy reflections will in no way influence fate, whereas one may weaken the constitution by the waste of energy while indulging in them.

  George Hackenschmidt

  Fate, Reflection, Worry

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• I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, Loss, Exercise

  Bertrand Russell (1998). “Autobiography”, p.440, Psychology Press

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• Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Morning, Moon, Thinking

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (1995). “This Side of Paradise”, p.102, Cambridge University Press

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• I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

  Voltaire

  Stupid, Heart, Love Life

  Voltaire (1956). “Candide: or, Optimism”

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• The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  People, Disease, Pessimism

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• Our conflict is not likely to cease so soon as every good man would wish. The measure of iniquity is not yet filled; and unless we can return a little more to first principles, and act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know when it will-or-what may be the issue of the contest. Speculation-peculation-engrossing-forestalling-with all their concomitants, afford too many melancholy proofs of the decay of public virtue; and too glaring instances of its being the interest and desire of too many, who would wish to be thought friends, to continue the war.

  George Washington

  War, Patriotic, Men

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson, United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (1779). “The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799”, p.312

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• I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

  Agnes Varda

  People, Missing, Nostalgia

  Interview with Noel Murray, film.avclub.com. June 30, 2009.

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• Sweet bird that shunn'st the nose of folly, Most musical, most melancholy! Thee, chauntress, oft, the woods among, I woo, to hear thy even-song.

  John Milton

  Song, Sweet, Bird

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• Pain seems to be easier, or melancholy seems to be easier to portray in a character. I don't know if that's because I'm a human being or because I'm an Irishman or both.

  Colin Farrell

  Pain, Character, Easier

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• The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

  Voltaire

  Suicide, Men, Today

  Voltaire (2016). “VOLTAIRE – Premium Collection: Novels, Philosophical Writings, Historical Works, Plays, Poems & Letters (60+ Works in One Volume) - Illustrated: Candide, A Philosophical Dictionary, A Treatise on Toleration, Plato's Dream, The Princess of Babylon, Zadig, The Huron, Socrates, The Sage and the Atheist, Dialogues, Oedipus, Caesar…”, p.2902, e-artnow

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• And the Sabbath bell, That over wood and wild and mountain dell Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy With sounds most musical, most melancholy.

  Samuel Rogers

  Musical, Mountain, Sound

  Samuel Rogers (1836). “Poems”, p.85

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• Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper... a windshield wiper that's fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing 'Melancholy Baby' and you've got dance music.

  Artie Shaw

  Baby, Giving, Tunes

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• Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.

  Thomas Paine

  Guilt, Poison, Care

  Thomas Paine (1922). “Paine's Complete Works ...”

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• What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.

  Sylvia Plath

  Horse, Wind, Knives

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “The Colossus”, p.10, Faber & Faber

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• I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

  Michael Haneke

  Tendencies, Feels, Happy Person

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• From the cab stepped a tall old man. Black raincoat and hat and a battered valise. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless, staring at the house. The cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-sixty Street. Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. As he turned the corner, he noticed that the tall old man hadn't moved but was standing under the streetlight glow, in mist, like a melancholy traveler frozen in time.

  William Peter Blatty

  Men, House, Black

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• I think there has to be an underlying sexuality. There has to be a perverseness to the clothes. There is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance. It's like a Story of O. I am not big on women looking naive. There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it's melancholy of sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it's good to use a little of it-and sometimes a lot of it-like a masquerade.

  Alexander McQueen

  Thinking, Clothes, Romance

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