Moping melancholy. [ Milton ]
All perfection is melancholy. [ Mrs. Oliphant ]
Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy. [ William Shakespeare ]
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy. [ Milton ]
I can suck melancholy out of a song. [ William Shakespeare ]
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow. [ Goldsmith ]
A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind. [ Dryden ]
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste. [ Bryant ]
It is impious in a good man to be sad. [ William Shakespeare ]
Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad. [ Victor Hugo ]
A melancholy sound is in the air,
A deep sigh in the distance, a shrill wail
Around my dwelling. 'Tis the Wind of night [ William Cullen Bryant ]
Melancholy is the convalescence of sorrow. [ Mme. Dufresnoy ]
And the Sabbath bell,
That over wood and wild and mountain dell
Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy
With sounds most musical, most melancholy. [ Samuel Rogers ]
Employment and hardships prevent melancholy. [ Johnson ]
All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments, to melancholy bells;
Our wedding cheer, to sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns, to sullen dirges change:
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary. [ William Shakespeare ]
Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
Brought from a pensive through a happy place. [ Wordsworth ]
Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy. [ Milton ]
Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles. [ Leigh Hunt ]
He's a fool that is not melancholy once a day. [ Proverb ]
Nothing is so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy. [ Samuel Fletcher ]
O melancholy, whoever yet could sound thy bottom? [ William Shakespeare ]
Genius! thou gift of Heaven! thou Light divine!
Amid what dangers art thou doom'd to shine!
Oft will the body's weakness check thy force,
Oft damp thy Vigour, and impede thy course;
And trembling nerves compel thee to restrain
Thy noble efforts, to contend with pain;
Or Want (sad guest!) will in thy presence come,
And breathe around her melancholy gloom:
To Life's low cares will thy proud thought confine,
And make her sufferings, her impatience, thine. [ Crabbe ]
Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy. [ Aristotle ]
There is a melancholy which accompanies all enthusiasm. [ Shaftesbury ]
What is a great estate good for, if it brings melancholy? [ Proverb ]
Cheerfulness is health; the opposite, melancholy, is disease. [ Haliburton ]
Books afford the surest relief in the most melancholy moments. [ Zimmermann ]
Aristotle said ... melancholy men of all others are most witty. [ Burton ]
Melancholy advanceth men's conceits more than any humor whatever. [ Burton ]
No grief so soft, no pain so sweet, as love's delicious melancholy. [ Mrs. Osgood ]
Melancholy is a fearful gift. What is it but the telescope of truth! [ Byron ]
There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy. [ Hood ]
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! [ William Shakespeare ]
Active natures are rarely melancholy. Activity and melancholy are incompatible. [ Bovee ]
If idleness do not produce vice or malevolence, it commonly produces melancholy. [ Sydney Smith ]
Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy? [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Fear and sorrow are the true characters and inseparable companions of most melancholy. [ Burton ]
We're not ourselves when Nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body. [ William Shakespeare ]
Religion is no friend to laziness and stupidity, or to supine and sottish despondencies of mind. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm. [ Addison ]
Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy sad soul.... He goes always heavy-loaded, and thou must bear half. [ Fenélon ]
There are profound sorrows which remain stored in our souls, and which we always find there when we are melancholy. [ Mme. de Salm ]
In observing the world's movements, the most melancholy man would become merry, and Heraclitus would die of laughter. [ Chamfort ]
Both beauty and ugliness are equally to be dreaded; the one as a dangerous gift, the other as a melancholy affliction. [ Eliza Cook ]
It is very strange and very melancholy that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us to call hunting one of them. [ Dr. Johnson ]
The instability of friendship fumishes one of the most melancholy reflections suggested by the contemplation of human life. [ R. A. Wilmott ]
Wise men mingle mirth with their cares, as a help either to forget or overcome them; but to resort to intoxication for the ease of one's mind is to cure melancholy by madness. [ Charron ]
There is a gravity which is not austere nor captious, which belongs not to melancholy nor dwells in contraction of heart; but arises from tenderness and hangs upon reflection. [ Landor ]
I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness. [ Pliny the Elder ]
Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair; and at their heels, a huge infectious troop of pale distemperatures and foes to life. [ William Shakespeare ]
Sing of the nature of women, and then the song shall be surely full of variety, - old crotchets and most sweet closes. It shall be humorous, grave, fantastical, amorous, melancholy, sprightly, - one in all, all in one. [ Marston ]
Melancholy, or low spirits, is that hysterical passion which forces unbidden sighs and tears; it falls upon a contented life, like a drop of ink on white paper, which is not the less a stain that it carries no meaning with it. [ Sir W. Scott ]
Imaginary evils soon become real ones, by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall, or the wainscot, can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied. [ Swift ]
Good-humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers. [ Alcott ]
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time. [ Emerson ]
The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn, We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most. [ Thomas Starr King ]
An inoffensive pleasantness is a good quality to improve friendship. It enlivens conversation, relieves melancholy, and conveys advice with better success than naked reprehension. This gilding the pill reconciles the palate to the prescription, without weakening the force of the ingredients, and he who can cure by recreation, and make pleasure the vehicle of health, is a doctor in good earnest. [ R. Hall ]