Melancholy Quotes - Page 6

• Everything tender and melancholy - as life is sometimes, just for one moment.

  Jean Rhys

  Sometimes, Life Is, Moments

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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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• 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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• Be cheerful [and grateful for the good that you have]: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized until a chain is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.

  Arthur Helps

  Gratitude, Spring, Grateful

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

  Thomas Chandler Haliburton

  Gratitude, Grateful, Opposites

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

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Gratitude, Worst

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• That distrust which intrudes so often on your mind is a mode of melancholy, which, if it be the business of a wise man to be happy, it is foolish to indulge; and if it be a duty to preserve our faculties entire for their proper use, it is criminal. Suspicion is very often an useless pain.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wise, Pain, Men

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Edmond Malone (1824). “The life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., comprehending an account of his studies, and numerous works, in chronological order: a series of his epistolary correspondence and conversations with many eminent persons; and various original pieces of his composition, never before published; the whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century during which he flourished”, p.132

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• Be cheerful in all that you do. Live joyfully. Live happily. Live enthusiastically, knowing that God does not dwell in gloom and melancholy, but in light and love.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Love, Happiness, Light

  Ezra Taft Benson (1988). “The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• 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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• ...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

  William Shakespeare

  Sadness, Blood, Nurse

  William Shakespeare (2009). “Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twel fth Night”, p.69, Bantam Classics

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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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• 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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• A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.

  Michael Silverblatt

  Reading, Book, Design

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• Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.

  Antonio Tabucchi

  Running, Thinking, Museums

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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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• 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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• I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

  Gunter Grass

  Progress, Tails, Coins

  "Diary of a Snail (On Stasis and Progress)". Book by Gunter Grass, 1972.

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• A sort of melancholy, and regret, seizes us every time we meet a sophisticated, adulterated idiot. Oh the nice fools of yestertime! Genuine, natural. Like homemade bread.

  Leonardo Sciascia

  Regret, Nice, Stupidity

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• His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

  Bela Bartok

  Music, Echoes, Years

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• To me, the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing; the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful, sorrowful thing. It's more reflective; it reminds you to feel.

  Mick Fleetwood

  Thinking, Needs, Infection

  FaceBook post by Mick Fleetwood from Oct 06, 2015

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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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• 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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• Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.

  Russell Brand

  Spiritual, Pain, Self

  Russell Brand (2010). “Articles of Faith”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

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• To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Media Control, Sound, Principles

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.274, Cambridge University Press

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• The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

  Emile M. Cioran

  Suicide, World, Abandon

  Emile M. Cioran (1999). “All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms”, p.86, Arcade Publishing

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