Melancholy Quotes

• And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  "The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe".

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• I fell in love with melancholy

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Edgar Allan Poe (1984). “Poetry and Tales”, p.54, Library of America

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• There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

  Albert Camus

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• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

  Anatole France

  Life, Change, People Changing

  Anatole France (2016). “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard”, p.186, Anatole France

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• Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.

  Aristotle

  Men, Great Men, Temperament

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

  Victor Hugo

  Sad, Being Sad, Pleasure

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.5393, Delphi Classics

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• Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes, I think. It's not a negative thing. It's not a mean thing. It's just something that happens in life, like autumn.

  Bill Murray

  Sweet, Mean, Autumn

  Source: movieweb.com

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• But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.

  William Shakespeare

  Humorous, Sadness, Rumination

  William Shakespeare (2001). “As You Like It”, p.211, Classic Books Company

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• Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Book, People, Sensual

  Gustave Flaubert (1967). “Intimate notebook, 1840-1841”

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• What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.

  David Guterson

  People, Serenity, Literature

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• I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.

  Osamu Dazai

  Agony, Optimism, Agitation

  Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.28, New Directions Publishing

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• I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Literature, Type, I Can

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• Moping melancholy And moon-struck madness.

  John Milton

  Moon, Madness

  'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 11, l. 485

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• Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

  Italo Calvino

  Sad, Taken, Lightness

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.19, Harvard University Press

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• A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind.

  John Dryden

  Numbness, Lazy, Mind

  John Dryden, C. B., Esquire Charles BATHURST (1852). “Selections from the poetry of Dryden, including his plays and translations. [The editor's preface signed: C. B., i.e. Charles Bathurst.]”, p.128

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• Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

  Susan Sontag

  Depression, Fit, Charm

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.

  William C. Bryant

  Fall, Sadness, Autumn

  William Cullen Bryant, “The Death Of The Flowers”

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• Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.

  Francis Beaumont

  Sweet, Lovely, Literature

  Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher (1750). “The Works of Francis Beaumont, and Mr. John Fletcher: The two noble kinsmen; Thierry and Theodoret; The woman-hater; The nice valour; The honest man's fortune; A masque; Four plays or moral representations in one”, p.336

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• It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

  Tim Winton

  Flirting, Thinking, Too Much

  Tim Winton (2009). “Breath”, p.244, Pan Macmillan

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• Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

  Virginia Woolf

  Good Night, Winter, Sound

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “Jacob's Room”, p.46, Booklassic

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• Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

  Samuel Johnson

  Drinking, Mean, Alcohol

  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.5

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• You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs―the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate―the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Children, Artist, Flames

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.72, Vintage

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• Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Sad, Misery, Appetite

  Emile M. Cioran (1999). “All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms”, p.51, Arcade Publishing

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• it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.

  Franz Kafka

  Lying, Principles, Accepting

  Franz Kafka (1983). “The Penguin complete novels of Franz Kafka”

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• Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

  Thomas E. Mann

  Cheer, Knowledge, Expression

  "Tonio Kröger". Book by Thomas Mann, 1903.

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