Melancholy Quotes
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There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.
Honore de Balzac
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Sing of the nature of women, and then the song shall be surely full of variety; old crotchets and most sweet closes. It shall be humorous, grave, fantastic, amorous, melancholy, sprightly, one in all, and all in one.
John Marston
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They say that no one's gonna play this on the radio. They said the melancholy blues were dead and gone. But only songs like these played in minor keys, keep those memories holding on.
Billy Joel
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I think my cheerfulness keeps my writing from sinking into the depths of melancholy, while the darker side keeps in check any literary silliness I might be inclined toward.
David Starkey
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My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot
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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
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As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
Jonathan Swift
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Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.
Sarah Vowell
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
William James
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Life is a well of joy; but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks, which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
Virginia Woolf
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From the cab stepped a tall old man. Black raincoat and hat and a battered valise. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless, staring at the house. The cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-sixty Street. Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. As he turned the corner, he noticed that the tall old man hadn't moved but was standing under the streetlight glow, in mist, like a melancholy traveler frozen in time.
William Peter Blatty
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
Vladimir Nabokov
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No one can actually define love, but you attempt to, and the closest you can get is longing. And that itself has a melancholy to it. You can say dread, or doom - it's that feeling we all feel when we fall in love with someone: we have this horrible, fearful feeling that maybe we will never have that person in our life.
Robert Zemeckis
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I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general.
Sandra Bullock
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Melancholy had its place. A café.
Edmund de Waal
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The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color, is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
Thomas Starr King
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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
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The first cuckoo's melancholy cry.
William Wordsworth
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It is a sad and very melancholy scene, which must strike everyone who knows and feels that we also have to pass one day through the valley of the shadow of death, and “que la fin de la vie humaine, ce sont des larmes ou des cheveux blancs.” What lies beyond this is a great mystery that only God knows, but He has revealed absolutely through His word that there is a resurrection of the dead.
Vincent Van Gogh
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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
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Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there.
Ismail Merchant
