Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Melancholy

"I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged." -

"Be cheerful: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized until a chain is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy" - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy soul: he'll be sure to aggravate thy adversity, and lessen thy prosperity. He goes always heavy loaded; and thou must bear half. He's never in a good humor; and may easily get into a bad one, and fall out with thee." - Thomas Fuller

"Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy soul; he will be sure to aggravate thy adversity, and lessen your prosperity. He goes always heavy loaded; and thou must bear half. He is never in a good humor; and may easily get into a bad one, and fall out with thee." - Thomas Fuller

"Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment. " - Dmitri Shostakovich, fully Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich

"Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"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

"Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative." - Martin Heidegger

"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, fully Maurice Auguste Chevalier

"And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is." - Mircea Eliade

"I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake." - Morris West, fully Morris Langlo West

"It has been four years since I commenced this life of solitude, living in the maid's room and cooking for myself. At first there was a certain novelty in the arrangement. Then, toward the end of last year, the ways of the military government began to grow more arbitrary, and there came a change in the world; and somehow the drab and inconvenient life of the bachelor has come to seem so appropriate to the moods of the days that I would not now find it easy to change. Indeed, my feelings and thoughts are quite beyond description when, on an evening of a sudden autumn rain, I drag my sandals along the cliff, taking care that the frayed thong does not break, and buy onions and radishes in Tanimachi. I am quite drunk with the melancholy poetry of it all. However malicious and arbitrary may be the ways of the government, it cannot keep one's fancies from running free. There will be freedom while there is life." - Kafū Nagai, pen name for Nagai Sōkichi

"Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret." - Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington

"How melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories are shadows, not substantial things. Truly said the sayer, disappointment is the salt of life a salutary bitter which strengthens the mind for fresh exertion, and gives a double value to the prize." -

"Now the last hookah has gone out, and the most restless of our servants has turned in. The roof of the cabin is strewed with bodies anything but fragrant, indeed, we cannot help pitying the melancholy fate of poor Morpheus, who is traditionally supposed to encircle such sleepers with his soft arms. Could you believe it possible that through such a night as this they choose to sleep under those wadded cotton coverlets, and dread not instantaneous asphixiation?" -

"Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy." - Robert Burton

"Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand? " - Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington

"How melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories are shadows, not substantial things. Truly said the sayer, disappointment is the salt of life a salutary bitter which strengthens the mind for fresh exertion, and gives a double value to the prize." -

"Now the last hookah has gone out, and the most restless of our servants has turned in. The roof of the cabin is strewed with bodies anything but fragrant, indeed, we cannot help pitying the melancholy fate of poor Morpheus, who is traditionally supposed to encircle such sleepers with his soft arms. Could you believe it possible that through such a night as this they choose to sleep under those wadded cotton coverlets, and dread not instantaneous asphixiation?" -

"The superior thing, in this as in other departments of life, was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual...Mystery at Geneva" - Rose Macauley, fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay

"War knows no power. Safe shall be my going, Secretly armed against all death's endeavor Safe though all safety's lost safe where men fall And if these poor limbs die, safest of all." - Rupert Brooke

"The only road, the sure road to unquestioned credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual fulfilment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private, according to its letter and spirit." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them." - Samuel Pepys

"He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. It is cocaine, he said, a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?" - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness." - Thomas Jefferson

"A state of conscience is higher than a state of innocence." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." - Thomas Paine

"Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath." - William Collins

"I was a poet too; but modern taste is so refined and delicate and chaste, that verse, whatever fire the fancy warms, without a creamy smoothness has no charms. Thus, all success depending on an ear, and thinking I might purchase it too dear, if sentiment were sacrific'd to sound, and truth cut short to make a period round, I judg'd a man of sense could scarce do worse than caper in the morris-dance of verse." - William Cowper

"How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone." - Walter Bagehot

"The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people." - Walter Bagehot

"There is a greater difference both in the stages of life and in the seasons of the year than in the conditions of men: yet the healthy pass through the seasons, from the clement to the unclement, not only unreluctant but rejoicingly, knowing that the worst will soon finish, and the best begin anew; and we are desirous of pushing forward into every stage of life, excepting that only which ought reasonably to allure us most, as opening to us the Via sacra, along which we move in triumph to our eternal country. We labor to get through a crowd. Such is our impatience, such our hatred of procrastination, in everything but the amendment of our practices and the adornment of our nature, one would imagine we were dragging Time along by force, and not he us." - Walter Savage Landor

"From ten thousand valleys the trees touch heaven; on a thousand peaks cuckoos are calling; and, after a night of mountain rain, from each summit come hundreds of silken cascades. ...If girls are asked in tribute the fibre they weave, or farmers quarrel over taro fields, preside as wisely as Wenweng did... Is fame to be only for the ancients?" - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"Young lawyers attend the courts not because they have business there but because they have no business anywhere else." - Washington Irving

"It is, indeed, marvelous that science should ever have revived amid the fearful obstacles theologians cast in her way. Together with a system of biblical interpretation so stringent, and at the same time so capricious, that it infallibly came into collision with every discovery that was not in accordance with the unaided judgments of the senses, and therefore with the familiar expressions of the Jewish writers, everything was done to cultivate a habit of thought the direct opposite of the habits of science. The constant exaltation of blind faith, the countless miracles, the childish legends, all produced a condition of besotted ignorance, of groveling and trembling credulity, that can scarcely be paralleled except among the most degraded barbarians. Innovation of every kind was regarded as a crime; superior knowledge excited only terror and suspicion. If it was shown in speculation, it was called heresy. If it was shown in the study of nature, it was called magic. The dignity of the Popedom was unable to save Gerbert from the reputation of a magician, and the magnificent labors of Roger Bacon were repaid by fourteen years of imprisonment, and many others of less severe but unremitting persecution. Added to all this, the overwhelming importance attached to theology diverted to it all those intellects which in another condition of society would have been employed in the investigations of science. When Lord Bacon was drawing his great chart of the field of knowledge, his attention was forcibly drawn to the torpor of the middle ages. That the mind of man should so long have remained tranced and numbed, seemed, at first sight, an objection to his theories, a contradiction to his high estimate of human faculties. But his answer was prompt and decisive. A theological system had lain like an incubus upon Christendom, and to its influence, more than to any other single cause, the universal paralysis is to be ascribed." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of eachother's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"The dreamer sometimes falls into the doldrums, but is said to emerge from them again. And the absent-minded person also makes up for it with bouts of perspicacity. Sometimes he is a person whose right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you, or more usually, you may absent-mindedly allow it to slip from your mind. Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"All the crimes of man begin with the vagrancy of childhood." - Victor Hugo

"One who is angry does not distinguish between what can be spoken and what is unspeakable. There is nothing which an angry man cannot do meaning he can commit any crime. There is nothing unspeakable for him. Fire cannot act on fire." - Valmiki NULL