#Melancholy Quotes

“I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”

“I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”

“I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth,forgone all custom of exercise.”

“By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be mekancholy.”

“Now the melancholy God protect thee, and the tailor make thy garments of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is opal.”

“...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.”

“What e'er you areThat in this desert inaccessible,Under the shade of melancholy boughs,Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.”

“But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.”

“I have a soul of lead So stakes me to the ground I cannot move.”

“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”

“Let me be boiled to death with melancholy.”

“Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair.”

“Night's candles have burned out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops." Hope tinged with melancholy - like life.”

“How is it that the clouds still hang on you?”

“While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.”

“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.”

“on the instant clamorous eaves,A climbing moon upon an empty sky,And all that lamentation of the leaves,Could but compose man's image and his cry.”

“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.”

“Because of something told under the famished hornOf the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day,To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay,Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.”

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”

“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.”

“Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.”

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”

“Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.”

“As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.”

“Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.”

“The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.”

“The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.”

“The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.”

“In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.”

“My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.”

“Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.”

“But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.”

“Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.”

“Aristoteles quidem ait: 'Omnes ingeniosos melancholicos esse.' Aristotle says that all men of genius are melancholy.”

“I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.”

“Love is a naked shadow, On a gnarled and naked tree.”

“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.”

“Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.”

“The days are short,The sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and dark.”

“There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy.”

“I have shed pewter tears! It is too melancholy! Rather let me go to the wars and lose arms and legs! It would at least be a change. I cannot bear it longer! Now, I know what it is to have a visit from one's old thoughts, with what they may bring with them! I have had a visit from mine, and you may be sure it is no pleasant thing in the end; I was at last about to jump down from the drawers.”

“People who walk across dark bridges, past saints, with dim, small lights. Clouds which move across gray skies past churches with towers darkened in the dusk. One who leans against granite railing gazing into the evening waters, His hands resting on old stones.”

“There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.”

“I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me.”

“I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee.”

“I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.”

“... she indulged in melancholy - that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries.”

“It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.”