Melancholy Quotes - Page 6

• A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Memories, Drama

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• If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

  Gunter Grass

  Age, Dawn, Principles

  "From the Diary of a Snail". Book by Gunter Grass, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

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• Dance with all the might of your body, and all the fire of your soul, in order that you may shake all melancholy out of your liver; and you need not restrain yourself with the apprehension that any lady will have the least fear that the violence of your movements will ever shake anything out of your brains.

  Lola Montez

  Fire, Order, Dancing

  Lola Montez (1858). “The Arts of Beauty: Or, Secrets of a Lady's Toilet”, p.114

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• Let me be boiled to death with melancholy.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Let Me

  William Shakespeare, Thomas BOWDLER (F.R.S.) (1831). “The Family Shakspeare ... By T. Bowdler ... Sixth Edition”, p.72

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• Melancholy sees the worst of things...[rather than the best]

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Gratitude, Worst

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• [Grateful] Cheerfulness is health; its opposite, [ungrateful] melancholy, is disease.

  Thomas Chandler Haliburton

  Gratitude, Grateful, Opposites

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• The terms good and bad indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking or notions, which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf; it is neither good nor bad.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Gratitude, Thinking, Quality

  Baruch Spinoza “Ethics”, Lulu.com

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• Counting our blessings can transform melancholy into cheerful mass; laughter and joy are expressions of praise and thanksgiving for life's glories. When looking at the glass that symbolizes our life, we can view it as half full or half empty. The choice is ours... The more joyful we are, the more attractive we become. When we feel gratitude for our experiences, it becomes easier to see the good that always exists. When we give a smile to someone else, we are likely to receive one in return, and that smile reflects a happy heart that is open and receptive to what the good life has in store.

  John Templeton

  Gratitude, Good Life, Laughter

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• We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations.

  Joseph Howe

  Smile, Illustration, May

  Joseph Howe (1858). “Speeches and Public Letters”, p.39

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• Munch writes poetry with color. He has taught himself to see the full potential of color in art His use of color is above all lyrical. He feels color and he reveals his feelings through colors; he does not see them in isolation. He does not just see yellow, red and blue and violet; he sees sorrow and screaming and melancholy and decay.

  Sigbjørn Obstfelder

  Art, Writing, Blue

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• We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."

  Octavio Paz

  Life, Roots, Individuality

  Octavio Paz (1987). “1904-1912”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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• It is thus religion infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity and fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination it drives him on to fury; if he has activity, it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel to himself, as he is dangerous and incommodious to others: if, on the contrary, he be phlegmatic or of a slothful habit, he becomes melancholy and is useless to society.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Men, Vanity

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• Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Grief, Holiday

  "Orthodoxy". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

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• In saying no to progress, it is not the future which they condemn, but themselves. They give themselves a melancholy disease; they inoculate themselves with the past. There is but one way of refusing tomorrow, that is to die.

  Victor Hugo

  Past, Giving, Progress

  Victor Hugo (1862). “Saint Denis”, p.100

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• The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

  Walter Bagehot

  Reflection, Doe, Harm

  'Physics and Politics' (1872) 'The Age of Discussion'

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• Books are never out of humour; never envious or jealous, they answer all questions with readiness; ... they teach us how to live and how to die; they dispel melancholy by their mirth, and amuse by their wit; they prepare the soul to suffer everything and desire nothing; they introduce us to ourselves.

  Holbrook Jackson

  Book, Jealous, Soul

  Holbrook Jackson (1950). “The Anatomy of Bibliomania”, p.85, University of Illinois Press

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• Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

  Anthony Trollope

  Romance, Stories, Matter

  Anthony Trollope (1869). “He Knew He was Right”, p.272

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• I never knew a man troubled with melancholy, who had plenty to do, and did it.

  Josh Billings

  Men, Emotion, Plenty

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• There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for melancholy of relationships past. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.

  Kary Mullis

  Country, Past, Thinking

  Kary Mullis (2010). “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field”, p.13, Vintage

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• The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

  Rose Macaulay

  Dream, Men, Past

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.), Roloff Beny, Constance Babington Smith (1977). “Roloff Beny interprets in photographs Pleasure of ruins”

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• I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

  Frederic Chopin

  Life, Dream, Sweet

  Frederic Chopin (2013). “Chopin's Letters”, p.166, Courier Corporation

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• I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions.

  Chantal Kreviazuk

  Writing, Stuff, Emotion

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• There is a melancholy that stems from greatness

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Greatness, Stem

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• The melancholy thing in our public life is the insane desire to get higher.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Insane, Desire, Getting High

  Letter "to a leading editor" on April 10, 1875. "The Life Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes", edited by James Quay Howard, ch. X, p. 144, www.gutenberg.org. 2007.

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• A lot of people say I wouldn't have a down day, but you look at the music and there's real melancholy.

  Stephan Jenkins

  Real, People, Looks

  "He can see clearly now / Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins looks at success, love, creativity". Interview with Julian Guthrie, www.sfgate.com. April 20, 2003.

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