52 Melancholy Quotes To Reflect

Life ebbs and flows with moments of joy and sorrow, and sometimes, it's in the melancholic moments that we find a unique beauty and depth. In these times of introspection, words can offer solace, understanding, and a sense of connection. Our carefully chosen collection of the top 52 melancholy quotes aims to provide a mirror to your soul, offering reflections from poets, writers, and thinkers who have walked through similar shadows. Whether you're seeking comfort, resonance, or simply an opportunity to reflect, these quotes serve as gentle companions on your journey through life's more sombre hues. Join us as we explore these poignant words that capture the essence of melancholy, reminding us that we are never alone in our feelings.

1. “I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” - Edgar Allan Poe

2. “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

3. “I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?” - Audrey Niffenegger

4. “Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.” - Charles Nodier

5. “An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself” - Alejandra Pizarnik

6. “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” - Remy De Gourmont

7. “Name me no names for my disease,With uninforming breath;I tell you I am none of these,But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,For brooks that I had crossed,...Before I met this flesh and boneAnd followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,Yet name no name of ills.Say only, "Here is where he passed,Seeking again those hills.” - Witter Bynner

8. “A light which lives on what the flames devour,a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,a crucifixion by a single wound,a sky and earth that darken by each hour,a sob of blood whose red ribbon adornsa lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest--this is the wreath of love, this bed of thornsis where I dream of you stealing my rest,haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.I sought the peak of prudence, but I foundthe hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,and my own thirst for bitter truth and art.- Stigmata of Love” - Federico García-Lorca

9. “That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. Morescientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But aharsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could notremain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

10. “The soulless have no need of melancholia” - Vladimir Odoyevsky

11. “I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.” - Virginia Woolf

12. “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.” - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

13. “The lost glove is happy.” - Vladimir Nabokov

14. “He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.” - P.G. Wodehouse

15. “Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.” - Scott Turow

16. “To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)” - Thomas Ligotti

17. “I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.” - Douglas Coupland

18. “I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.” - Hermann Hesse

19. “Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake.” - Christina Rossetti

20. “Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.” - Virginia Woolf

21. “Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.” - W.N.P. Barbellion

22. “The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.” - Virginia Woolf

23. “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.” - Virginia Woolf

24. “I feel as if I had been born dead underAmerican bombardment.” - Stefan Bolea

25. “Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;” - Emile Durkheim

26. “How I hate everything!” - Edith Wharton

27. “Credinţa zugrăveşte icoanele-n biserici -Şi-n sufletu-mi pusese poveştile-i feerici,Dar de-ale vieţii valuri, de al furtunii pasAbia conture triste şi umbre-au mai rămas.În van mai caut lumea-mi în obositul creier,Căci răguşit, tomnatec, vrăjeşte trist un greier;Pe inima-mi pustie zadarnic mâna-mi ţiu,Ea bate ca şi cariul încet într-un sicriu.Şi când gândesc la viaţa-mi, îmi pare că ea curăÎncet repovestită de o străină gură,Ca şi când n-ar fi viaţa-mi, ca şi când n-aş fi fost.Cine-i acel ce-mi spune povestea pe de rostDe-mi ţin la el urechea - şi râd de câte-ascultCa de dureri străine?... Parc-am murit de mult.” - Mihai Eminescu

28. “At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.” - Arthur Golden

29. “Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.” - Roger Zelazny

30. “I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.” - John Derbyshire

31. “...another comber of far pleasure followed the first, for his books came suddenly before his eyes, row upon row of volumes, row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of travel and fantasy; the stern and the ornate, the moods of gold or green, of sepia, rose, or black; the picaresque, the arabesque, the scientific - the essays, the poetry and the drama. All this, he felt, he would now re-enter. He could inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before.” - Mervyn Peake

32. “This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

33. “Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.” - Muriel Barbery

34. “He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.” - Horace Walpole

35. “Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.” - Michelle Tea

36. “She was not cryingWhich surprised me very muchBut I understand nowThat she had found placesFor her melancholyThat were behind more masksThan only her eyes” - Jonathan Safran Foer

37. “I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.” - Robert Walser

38. “Lincoln's story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. "What man actually needs," the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued,"is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal." Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people-- and particularly those under some emotional weight-- need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn't mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.” - Joshua Wolf Shenk

39. “Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.” - Alain De Botton

40. “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.” - Noelle Oxenhandler

41. “Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

42. “She had thought, instinctively, that Victoria had a remarkably beautiful face. The face showed an alert awareness of life: her lips- full, overblown like clown-lips liable to laugh at the slightest provocation. She thought that her features were not chiseled but almost rugged, handsome, like a colloquial swear-word or a Vermeer peasant-girl, and a knock out at that. An overdone face, like one having two chins, two noses, that was big and abundantly cheerful but at the same time, there was a peculiarly puffy look about those eyes.’('Left from Dhakeshwari')” - Kunal Sen

43. “As ofttimes as it rains on my little spot of earth, you'd think I'd grow accustomed to the gloom.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

44. “To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier.” - Dorothy Parker

45. “The words sounded like a mournful incantation.” - Dan Simmons

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

47. “If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.” - Carol Rifka Brunt

48. “I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.” - Ray Bradbury

49. “Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.” - Margaret Atwood

50. “Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.” - Paulo Coelho

51. “You’re going back?” asked Bod. Things that had been immutable were changing. “You’re really leaving? But. You’re my guardian.” “I was you’re guardian. But you are old enough to guard yourself. I have other things to protect.” - Neil Gaiman

52. “I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.” - Sylvia Plath