Quotes and Sayings about Melancholy
"All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves."
- Amelia Barr
(Related: Melancholy)
"I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Beauty, Melancholy)
"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."
- Francis Beaumont
(Related: Melancholy, Nothing)
"The cello is such a melancholy instrument, such an isolated, miserable instrument."
- Ritchie Blackmore
(Related: Melancholy)
"In such a diversity it was impossible I should be disposed to melancholy."
- Daniel Boone
(Related: Diversity, Melancholy)
"I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general."
- Sandra Bullock
(Related: Life, Being, Melancholy)
"Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end."
- Karel Capek
(Related: End, Mankind, Melancholy, Will)
"There is a melancholy that stems from greatness."
- Nicolas Chamfort
(Related: Greatness, Melancholy)
"A lot of the time there is a lot of melancholy in the lyrics."
- Will Champion
(Related: Time, Melancholy)
"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world."
- Maurice Chevalier
(Related: Age, Melancholy, Old, Reward, World, Youth)
"The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Literary, Melancholy, Personality)
"I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Thought, Children, Melancholy, World)
"Melancholy is as seductive as Ecstasy."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Ecstasy, Melancholy)
"It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations."
- Charles Dickens
(Related: Men, Truth, Melancholy, Poor)
"The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Time, Melancholy, Shadow, Sound)
"Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half."
- Francois Fenelon
(Related: Soul, Friends, Melancholy)
"Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning."
- Marsilio Ficino
(Related: Beginning, Melancholy)
"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
(Related: Life, Melancholy)
"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
(Related: Fact, Melancholy, Prophecy, Youth)
"The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Company, End, First, Fools, May, Melancholy, Smile)
"When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away?"
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Art, Men, Charm, Folly, Guilt, Melancholy, Woman)
"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."
- Gunther Grass
(Related: Age, Work, Busyness, Conflict, Consciousness, Dawn, Leisure, Melancholy, Utopia, Will)
"Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas."
- Gunther Grass
(Related: Life, Cause, Class, Melancholy, Mind, Privilege, Production, State, Wage)
"It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me."
- David Guterson
(Related: Melancholy)
"Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need."
- David Guterson
(Related: Cities, Melancholy, Tension)
"What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time."
- David Guterson
(Related: Time, People, Melancholy, Serenity)
"We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations."
- Joseph Howe
(Related: May, Melancholy, Smile)
"I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past."
- Julia Ward Howe
(Related: Happiness, Fear, Feeling, Future, Melancholy, Nothing, Past, Remembrance)
"Men are much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions."
- David Hume
(Related: Men, Melancholy)
"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
(Related: Music, People, Day, Melancholy)
"Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Drinking, Melancholy)
"I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Emotions, Melancholy, Writing)
"The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street."
- Charles Lamb
(Related: Man, Melancholy)
"Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness."
- Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont
(Related: Beginning, Despair, Doubt, Melancholy, Sadness, Wickedness)
"A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn?"
- Hugh Mackay
(Related: Autumn, Day, Easter, Energy, Melancholy, Spirit, Spring, Vitality)
"Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there."
- Ismail Merchant
(Related: Love, Longing, Melancholy, Sadness)
"That's one thing about fashion that you really shouldn't be-you can't be melancholy in fashion because people don't respond to it."
- Isaac Mizrahi
(Related: People, Fashion, Melancholy)
"I'm so involved in melancholy."
- Isaac Mizrahi
(Related: Melancholy)
"We have the melancholy dilemma of not being in a state to make peace or to prosecute war."
- George Montagu
(Related: Peace, War, Being, Melancholy, State)
"I pray God I may never be brought to the melancholy trial; but, if ever I should, it will then be known how far I can reduce to practice principles which I know to be founded in truth."
- James Otis
(Related: God, Truth, May, Melancholy, Practice, Principles, Will)
"It is better, however, for his own reputation that the story-teller should risk a few actions for libel on account of these unfortunate coincidences than that he should adopt the melancholy device of using blanks or asterisks."
- James Payn
(Related: Actions, Melancholy, Reputation, Risk)
"The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them."
- Albert Pike
(Related: Creation, Eyes, Man, Melancholy)
"There was a darkness, a melancholy, that people had trouble accepting. Maybe now, it would work better."
- Alain Resnais
(Related: Work, People, Darkness, Melancholy, Now, Trouble)
"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: Melancholy)
"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!"
- Gail Sheehy
(Related: Life, Melancholy)
"Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach."
- Sydney Smith
(Related: Habit, Melancholy, Will)
"Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits."
- Susan Sontag
(Related: Animation, Depression, Melancholy)
"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."
- Baruch Spinoza
(Related: Music, Time, Melancholy)
"My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Confusion, Melancholy, Poems, Today)
"Melancholy is no bad thing."
- Sting
(Related: Melancholy)
"In applying this subject to the melancholy event, which has deprived this Diocese of its venerable Bishop, we presume not to compare him with the blessed Apostle, of whom we have been speaking."
- John Strachan
(Related: Melancholy)
"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
(Related: Culture, Fact, Melancholy)
"When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful."
- Francois Truffaut
(Related: Funny, Humor, Success, Time, Melancholy)
"A commencement is a time of joy. It is also a time of melancholy. But then again, so is life."
- Paul Tsongas
(Related: Life, Time, Joy, Melancholy)
"Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."
- Arthur Wellesley
(Related: Battle, Melancholy, Nothing)
"Diabetes is caused by melancholy."
- Thomas Willis
(Related: Melancholy)
"This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air."
- William Butler Yeats
(Related: London, Melancholy)