Top 100 Quotes About Melancholy
#1. The gentle maid, whose hapless tale,
these melancholy pages speak;
say, gracious lady, shall she fail
To draw the tear a down from thy cheek?
Horace Walpole
#2. You can actually eat yourself into a better mood and get rid of depressive thoughts and melancholy.
Thorbjorg Hafsteinsdottir
#3. It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world.
Jason Mraz
#4. I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today!
Henry Miller
#5. I have a taste for a kind of melancholy and for being an absolute victim of love.
Arielle Dombasle
#6. Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.
Raheel Farooq
#7. 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
#8. If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.
Elie Wiesel
#9. Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.
Mike White
#10. And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.
Ray Bradbury
#11. Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.
Roland Barthes
#12. His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius's moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits.
Peter Matthiessen
#13. Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is the romantic. He is here.
Virginia Woolf
#14. There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm.
Joseph Addison
#15. As in our lives so also in our studies, it is most becoming and most wise, so to temper gravity with cheerfulness, that the former may not imbue our minds with melancholy, nor the latter degenerate into licentiousness.
Pliny The Elder
#17. So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.
Dodie Smith
#18. A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
William James
#19. But none of us wants to be average. That we are so is a melancholy fact borne in upon us in middle life, and we do not always relish it.
Margaret Benson
#20. She sat at the dining table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her, a distant look in her eyes. Holden couldn't tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those looks were confusingly similar.
James S.A. Corey
#21. It was a melancholy day indeed when the sister of solitude was Sunday's silver lining.
Alethea Kontis
#22. Justice is often pale and melancholy; but Gratitude, her daughter, is constantly in the flow of spirits and the bloom of loveliness.
Walter Savage Landor
#23. She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn't believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt.
Allegra Goodman
#24. 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
#25. Only, it's not an it. It's a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She's older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of pretty in a melancholy way.
Charles Yu
#26. All changes have their melancholy
Amy Cuddy
#27. You mustn't bury yourself alive, forget to rise up, or bind yourself to the dust in melancholy surrender.
Oddny Eir
#28. A tendancy to melancholy ... let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.
Abraham Lincoln
#29. She was gentle and sedate as usual, but evidently absent and preoccupied. Her eyes rested on the dew lying on the grass in the garden, and her ears were intent upon the melancholy singing of the autumn insects. It was as if we were in a real romance.
Murasaki Shikibu
#30. I strongly wish for what I faintly hope; like the daydreams of melancholy men, I think and think in things impossible, yet love to wander in that golden maze.
John Dryden
#31. I'm afraid they're in love," he said, concerned. "They don't want to leave you." He lifted one hand from her waist to gently brush a pair from her neck, where their wings fanned against her jaw. Melancholy, he said, "I know just how they feel.
Laini Taylor
#32. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.
Barton Swaim
#33. Gregor's glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather - the
rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window
ledge - made him quite melancholy.
Franz Kafka
#35. kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine. - One of
Mark Twain
#36. Religion is not a melancholy, the spirit of God is not a damper.
John Donne
#37. 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
#38. While the accompanimental [sic] figures come from Prelude, the melody is wholly original to this theme. First stated on a lonely duduk, and then in octaves by the violins and violas, it is a melancholy and contemplative tune.
Bear McCreary
#40. When the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.
John Keats
#42. 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
#43. But my favorite part in my body are my dark circles. They define me. They reveal my melancholy.
Lea Seydoux
#44. I have a constant sort of melancholy approach to acting that fuels me. I want to do everything.
Sam Rockwell
#45. 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
#46. Melancholy people have two reasons for being so: they don't know or they hope.
Albert Camus
#47. I kept ... returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
William Baziotes
#48. 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.
Comte De Lautreamont
#49. He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he'd been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.
Lev Grossman
#50. It is a melancholy fact that childhood, so short when compared with the average span of life, should exert such a strong and permanent influence on character that no amount of self-training afterwards can ever completely counter it.
Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
#51. If you haven't heard him ... man, it's like he boiled down down all the melancholy in the world, all the bruises and all the fucked-up dreams you've let go, and poured the essence into a little tiny bottle and corked it up.
Nick Hornby
#52. When something painful or disagreeable happens to me, instead of a melancholy look, I answer by a smile. At first I did not always succeed, but now it has become a habit which I am glad to have acquired.
Therese De Lisieux
#53. There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him.
Margaret Atwood
#55. Then, after he'd watched her walk out, a wave of melancholy swept over him and for the thirtieth time that day he regretted that he hadn't just become a pharmacist, or a charter captain, or something that made you feel more alive, like a pirate.
Christopher Moore
#56. 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
#58. I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.
William Trevor
#59. And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.
Edgar Allan Poe
#60. Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
Leonard Bernstein
#61. Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.
Thomas Gray
#62. The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.
William C. Bryant
#63. Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air ... I think it's a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them, you will hear its mate call back in a moment.
Jane Johnson
#64. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves.
Charles Dickens
#65. 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
#66. There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.
William Shakespeare
#67. Love, certainly, might be a momentarily strong force capable of moving individuals in strange and remarkable ways, but given sufficient time and the relentless weathering effects of repetition it will always and ultimately diffuse into boredom and melancholy.
John Zande
#68. It was that time of dusk when there is a - deepening of the interior shadows. It is a melancholy time: all you need do is switch on one lamp and the inside and the outside will separate, held apart by the reflections in the glass, and evening will begin.
Rudolph Delson
#69. Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles.
Leigh Hunt
#70. I cried for a little while, taking a kind of melancholy delight in my own tears, and then I fell asleep.
Barbara Cohen
#71. The melancholy joys of evils pass'd, For he who much has suffer'd, much will know.
Homer
#72. Despite her ability to enjoy most of their days, sometimes her despair was so great that, in a melancholy moment when she'd allow herself to think of her family, she'd almost stop breathing
Melina Marchetta
#73. The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -melancholy sadness- toward it.
Donald Barthelme
#74. The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.
John Berger
#75. There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy.
Thomas Hood
#76. She was humming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out - a folk song? a lullabye? - and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.
Gillian Flynn
#77. In Ruin City, in the rain, the sound of melancholy is a buzzing maelstrom of quiet desperation. The shatter has been so great, there is no sound left to despair.
Radhika Mukherjee
#78. If ever again, someone says to go to the market, where hearts are sold in exchange for melancholy souls, never would I go.
Never would I wait, if ever again someone says - not to.
Khadija Rupa
#79. All our anxieties relate to time ... The major problems of psychiatry revolve around an analysis of the despair, pessimism, melancholy, and complexes that are the inheritances of what has been or with the fears, anxieties, worries, that are the imaginings of what will be.
Fulton J. Sheen
#80. To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
Andre Gide
#81. No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.
Brian Dennehy
#82. 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
#83. Nor was Mr. Bumble's gloom the only thing calculated to awaken a pleasing melancholy in the bosom of a spectator. There
Charles Dickens
#84. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
Oscar Wilde
#86. As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work
Charles Baudelaire
#87. Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.
Marsilio Ficino
#89. What melancholy thought,' said the King, 'can possibly reach your heart when I place mine as a rampart before it?
Alexandre Dumas
#90. Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.
Julia Glass
#91. Because, whenever I am melancholy you talk to me of cheerful things and cure my low spirits and so I must now do the same for you. That is what friendship is.
Susanna Clarke
#93. 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
#94. Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.
Bruce Crown
#95. Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.
Charles Hazlewood
#96. For he used to say ... that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.
Thomas Mann
#98. I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
Edwidge Danticat
#100. At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.
F Scott Fitzgerald
