Melancholy Quotes - Page 24

• ...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

  Marcel Proust

  Real, Order, One Day

  Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.281, Wordsworth Editions

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In Physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors.

  John Milton

  Ayurveda, Quality, Hue

  Samson Agonistes Preface

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Come, let us give a little time to folly... and even in a melancholy day let us find time for an hour of pleasure.

  Bonaventure

  Change, Giving, Littles

  69 Copy quote

• The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Photography, People, Fundamentals

  Beaumont Newhall (1982). “The history of photography: from 1839 to the present”, Bulfinch Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.

  Emile Durkheim

  Life, Sad, Taken

  Emile Durkheim (2005). “Suicide: A Study in Sociology”, p.333, Routledge

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• Melancholy suicide. - This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract.

  Emile Durkheim

  Suicide, Sadness, People

  John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (2010). “Suicide”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

  69 Copy quote

  Show source

• A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Years, Old Friends, Lessons

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.336, Atlantic Books Ltd

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mean, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

• Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

  Duke of Wellington

  Peace, War, Battle

  Letter from the field of Waterloo in June 1815. "The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo" by Edward Shepherd Creasy, 1851.

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• This sorrow weighs upon the melancholy souls of those who lived without infamy or praise.

  Dante Alighieri

  Life, Soul, Sorrow

  "Inferno", III. 3 in "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, (pp. 440-455), 1922.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the moon shall have faded out from the sky, and the sun shall shine at noonday a dull cherry red, and the seas shall be frozen over, and the icecap shall have crept downward to the equator from either pole . . . when all the cities shall have long been dead and crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the last verge of extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen, growing on the bald rocks beside the eternal snows of Panama, shall be seated a tiny insect, preening its antennae in the glow of the worn-out sun, the sole survivor of animal life on this our earth - a melancholy bug.

  William Jacob Holland

  Life, Animal, Moon

  8 Copy quote

• You can’t take back texts. If you come off all moody and melancholy in a text, it just sits there in your phone, reminding you of what a drag you are.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Phones, Drag, Moody

  Rainbow Rowell (2016). “The Rainbow Rowell Collection: Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, Landline, and Carry On”, p.304, St. Martin's Griffin

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

  Samuel Johnson

  Hunting, Luck, Strange

  In Hester Lynch Piozzi 'Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson' (1786) p. 206

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I could not conjure up one melancholy fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of champagne.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Wine, Glasses, Fancy

  Jerome K. Jerome (2016). “The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow”, p.99, Jerome K. Jerome

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods, And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt, And night by night the monitory blast Wails in the key-hole, telling how it pass'd O'er empty fields, or upland solitudes, Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods Than any joy indulgent Summer dealt.

  William Allingham

  Summer, Fall, Autumn

  William Allingham (1854). “Day and Night Songs”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling — a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.

  Stephen King

  Lonely, Squares, Light

  Stephen King (2016). “It”, p.228, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source