Inspirational Quotes on Melancholy

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

“For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”

“My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.”

“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep! Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life;”

“Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.”

“So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.”

“Σίμωσε στο πιάνο και πήρε μερικά ακόρντα. Κείνη τη στιγμή΄έσπασε με κρότο μια χορδή κι έσβησε σ' ένα μακρόσυρτο και τρεμάμενο ήχο... -Ακούς Νιέτοτσκα, ακούς; ρώτησε, ξαφνικά με μια εμπνευσμένη φωνή, δείχνοντας το πιάνο. Τεντώσανε πολύ, πάρα πολύ τούτη τη χορδή· δεν μπόρεσε άλλο να βαστάξει και πέθανε. Ακούς, τι λυπητερά που πεθαίνουν οι ήχοι!”

“Out of a fired ship, which by no way But drowning could be rescued from the flame, Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came Near the foes' ships, did by their shot decay; So all were lost, which in the ship were found, They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown'd.”

“For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.”

“and what fantasy can there possibly be in misery? You sense that it will at length grow weary, that it is exhausting itself in constant tension, this inexhaustible fantasy, because after all one matures, outgrows one's former ideals; they are shattered into dust and fragments; and if you have no other life, it behoves you to construct one from those same fragments.”

“A los ídolos es mejor no tocarlos porque algo de la pintura dorada que los recubría se nos queda siempre entre las manos”

“So new to him,' she muttered, 'so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!”