Melancholy Quotes - Page 5

• You can't be melancholy in fashion because people don't respond to it.

  Isaac Mizrahi

  Fashion, People

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• What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

  Che Guevara

  Two, Land, Entering

  "The Motorcycle Diaries", 2004.

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• As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Plato, Compassion, Self

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• Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize a revolutionary situation when he saw one, and he could act fast and ruthlessly to meet it.

  Bruce Catton

  Understanding, Saws, Patient

  Bruce Catton (2011). “This Hallowed Ground: A History of the Civil War”, p.27, Vintage

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• Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

  Richard Le Gallienne

  Long, Way, Facts

  Richard Le Gallienne (1915). “Vanishing Roads, and Other Essays”

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• The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

  Oscar Wilde

  Believe, People, Rose

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.159, Wordsworth Editions

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• Sorrow was made for man, not for beasts; yet if men encourage melancholy too much, they become no better than beasts.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Men, Sorrow, Too Much

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1867). “Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote”, p.71

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• It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

  G. H. Hardy

  Appreciation, Art, Writing

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.61, Cambridge University Press

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• The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window.

  Emily Bronte

  Children, Struggle, Home

  Emily Bronte (2014). “Wuthering Heights”, p.31, Race Point Publishing

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• There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As it crossed the cold water, it lost its fervour. Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their head from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother...

  Vasily Grossman

  Brother, Husband, Father

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• Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.

  Félix J. Palma

  Cousin, Attitude, Literary Genre

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• Diabetes is caused by melancholy.

  Thomas Willis

  Diabetes

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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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• 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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• 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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• I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally.

  Colin Farrell

  Mean, Moon, Heaven

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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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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• Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief

  William Shakespeare

  Grief, Yellow, Green

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 2, sc. 4, l. [108]

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• I love the autumn for its sense of melancholy seems to strike my need for sadness. There is poetry in the dying of the year and mystery as well.

  Kyffin Williams

  Sadness, Autumn, Years

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• It is a grave misconception to regard the mystical progress as passing mostly through ecstasies and raptures. On the contrary, it passes just as much through broken hearts and bruised emotions, through painful sacrifices and melancholy renunciations.

  Paul Brunton

  Heart, Sacrifice, Broken

  Paul Brunton (1984). “The Notebooks of Paul Brunton: Perspectives (posthumous)”

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