In the quiet moments of introspection, we often find ourselves face-to-face with the twin emotions of melancholy and reflection. These feelings, though sometimes heavy, can offer profound insights and a deeper understanding of our own lives. Throughout history, thinkers, poets, and philosophers have captured the essence of these complex emotions in words, offering solace and inspiration to those in need. In this curated collection of 79 quotes, you'll discover a tapestry of thoughts that explore the beautiful intricacies of sadness and contemplation. Whether you seek comfort, validation, or simply the pleasure of pondering the human experience, these quotes will guide you on a journey through the depths of melancholy and the clarity of reflection.
1. “I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.” - Ray Bradbury
2. “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
3. “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.” - Edgar Allan Poe
4. “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley
5. “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
6. “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.” - Virginia Woolf
7. “Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.” - Charles Nodier
8. “Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.” - Italo Calvino
9. “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
10. “Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies” - Alejandra Pizarnik
11. “Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity, which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people there are who by natural constitution have been given a different nature and disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning which is wilder and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are opened wider; their senses are more subtile in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands.” - Jens Peter Jacobsen
12. “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?” - Soren Kierkegaard
13. “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
14. “And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.” - Mircea Eliade
15. “The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.” - Ray Bradbury
16. “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” - Susan Sontag
17. “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
18. “The soulless have no need of melancholia” - Vladimir Odoyevsky
19. “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
20. “To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.” - Edgar Allan Poe
21. “I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.” - Emilie Autumn
22. “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
23. “Voi rakkaanisydän on kylmäja sammalta käteni kasvaaMinun reiteni mullassa hajoovat maaksiJa haudalla risti jo lahona on.Olen maa.Olen maa johon tahdot.” - Timo K. Mukka
24. “The lost glove is happy.” - Vladimir Nabokov
25. “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
26. “I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.” - Daniel Keyes
27. “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
28. “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
29. “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
30. “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.” - Jonathan Edwards
31. “The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.” - Cormac McCarthy
32. “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
33. “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
34. “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
35. “I feel as if I had been born dead underAmerican bombardment.” - Stefan Bolea
36. “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
37. “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
38. “Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.” - Emil Cioran
39. “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” - Victor Hugo
40. “At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.” - Arthur Golden
41. “Cut my life into pizzas. this is my plastic fork. oven baking, no breathing, dont give a fuck if its carbs that i'm eating' -Catherine Spann” - Catherine Spann
42. “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
43. “The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” - Herman Melville
44. “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
45. “...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
46. “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
47. “Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.” - Muriel Barbery
48. “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.” - William Shakespeare
49. “His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.” - Iain M. Banks
50. “There can be few places more conducive to the quiet, solitary contemplation of melancholy thoughts than a window-seat; and if beyond the window-panes there is a steely vignette of November murk and withered twigs, so much the better.” - Jude Morgan
51. “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
52. “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
53. “Rightly tired of the pain İ hear and feel, boss... where we's comin from or goin to or why... If İ could end it, İ would. But İ can't.” - Stephen King
54. “I sometimes think about old tombs and weedsThat interwreathe among the bones of kingsWith cold and poisonous berry and black flower:Or ruminate upon the skulls of steedsFrailer than shells and on those luminous wings -The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grindInto so wraith-like a translucencyOf tissue-thin and aqueous bone- A Reverie of Bone” - Mervyn Peake
55. “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
56. “He had done nothing on Christmas day, just wandered around outside in the frozen woods. Hard ground, chill winds and bare branches that looked like they'd been dipped in sugar. None of it seemed real, like walking around in a desolate dream, but one he didn't want to wake up from.” - R.D. Ronald
57. “Qué haré ahora con mis labios sin su boca para llenarlos? ¿Qué haré de mis adoloridos labios?” - Juan Rulfo
58. “The hardest part for us was watching them harvest our Shamouti oranges.Those were our favourites, thick skinned, seedless and juicy.When the wind was strong, the scent of their blossoms in the spring and their fruit in the summer still reached us.” - Michelle Cohen Corasanti
59. “O üzüntü birdenbire gelir. Hava yağmurludur. Bir sonu gelmeyecek başlangıç. Böyle sürüp gidecek gibidir her şey. Öyle ki, çocuklar ile çirkindir.” - Sait Faik Abasıyanık
60. “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
61. “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
62. “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
63. “He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.” - Chris Cleave
64. “When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.” - David Foster Wallace
65. “Hands that never touch. Lips that never meet. The Almost Lovers, never to be.” - Rae Hachton
66. “Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)” - Roman Payne
67. “Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere - it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.It's better here in this taxi than it was walking. It's no good my trying to walk. There is always a glimpse through the crowd of someone who looks like him—someone with his swing of the shoulders, his slant of the hat. And I think it's he, I think he's come back. And my heart goes to scalding water and the buildings sway and bend above me. No, it's better to be here. But I wish the driver would go fast, so fast that people walking by would be a long gray blur, and I could see no swinging shoulders, no slanted hat.Dorothy Parker, Sentiment, Harper's Bazaar, May 1933.” - Dorothy Parker
68. “He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.” - Doppo Kunikida
69. “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
70. “As ofttimes as it rains on my little spot of earth, you'd think I'd grow accustomed to the gloom.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
71. “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
72. “Incluso en estos tiemposen los que soy feliz de otra manera,todos los días tienen ese instanteen que me jugaría la primaverapor tenerte delante.” - Joaquin Sabina
73. “Had it been possible for me to fix the plane permanently in the sky, to defy the winds and clouds and all the forces pushing it upward and pulling it earthward, I would have willingly done so. I would have stayed in my seat with my eyes closed, all strength and passion gone, my mind as quiescent as a coat rack under a forgotten hat, and I would have remained there, timeless, unmeasured, unjudged, bothering no one, suspended forever between my past and my future.” - Jerzy Kosinski
74. “Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...]I did not know what to say to this.Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind.Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.” - Dan Simmons
75. “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
76. “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
77. “Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.” - Margaret Atwood
78. “Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.” - Paulo Coelho
79. “Cyrano: The leaves---Roxane: What color---Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall.Cyrano: Yes---they know how to die. A little wayFrom the branch to the earth, a little fearOf mingling with the common dust---and yetThey go down gracefully---a fall that seemsLike flying!” - Edmond Rostand
