These melancholy quotes will inspire you. Melancholy, a sad mood or feeling or a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging melancholy quotes, melancholy sayings, and melancholy proverbs.
Best Melancholy Quotes
- “And so, being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “I fell in love with melancholy” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.” ~ Aristotle
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“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.” ~ Albert Camus
- “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” ~ Anatole France
- “Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes, I think. It’s not a negative thing. It’s not a mean thing. It’s just something that happens in life, like autumn.” ~ Bill Murray , Melancholy quotes about life
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“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.” ~ Italo Calvino
- “But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.” ~ William C. Bryant
- “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Moping melancholy And moon-struck madness.” ~ John Milton
- “Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.” ~ Henri Frederic Amiel
- “Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty.” ~ Aristotle
- “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind.” ~ John Dryden
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“Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.” ~ Francis Beaumont
- “Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive though a happy place.” ~ William Wordsworth
- “All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.” ~ Amelia Barr
- “I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I’m alone in the world and I’m just sort of abandoned.” ~ Jamaica Kincaid
- “Melancholy sees the worst of things, things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.” ~ Christian Nestell Bovee
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“The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.” ~ Charles Lamb
- “You can’t be melancholy in fashion because people don’t respond to it.” ~ Isaac Mizrahi
- “Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.” ~ Thomas Gray
- “And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?” ~ Jack Kerouac
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“In such a diversity it was impossible I should be disposed to melancholy.” ~ Daniel Boone
- “Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.” ~ George Santayana
- “But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.” ~ George Saintsbury
- “Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half.” ~ Francois Fenelon
- “Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.” ~ Scott Turow
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“It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.” ~ Tim Winton
- “Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “Employment and hardships prevent melancholy.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don’t feel required to grasp all the time.” ~ David Guterson
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“I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general.” ~ Sandra Bullock
- “Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “Melancholy Is not, as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind’s disease.” ~ John Ford
- “There is not a string attuned to mirth But has its chord of melancholy.” ~ Thomas Hood
- “Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end…” ~ Karel Capek
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“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find, upon a little inquiry, that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are cheerful now.” ~ Leigh Hunt
- “When lovely woman stoops to folly and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away?” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
- “The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.” ~ Jean Rhys , Feeling melancholy quotes
- “No grief so soft, no pain so sweet, as love’s delicious melancholy.” ~ Frances Sargent Osgood
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“You will be melancholy if you are solitary.” ~ Ovid
- “The first thing about a song is that it has to be real, be lived; it has to be emotional, and melancholic. I don’t mean sad. Melancholy is sort of a comfort. Melancholy has a sort of beauty to it. This attracts me to every other form of art.” ~ Keren Ann
- “The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation, but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.” ~ Albert Pike
- “The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it’s cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.” ~ Rita Dove
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“Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.” ~ Thomas E. Mann
- “I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “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
- “Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly! There’s naught in this life sweet But only melancholy; O sweetest melancholy!” ~ John Fletcher
- “It is a very melancholy reflection that men are usually so weak that it is absolutely necessary for them to know sorrow and pain to be in their right senses.” ~ Richard Steele
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“Sweet bird, that shun the noise of folly, most musical, most melancholy!” ~ John Milton
- “Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.” ~ Edward Abbey
- “I was walking along the road with two friends. The sunset. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red… I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.” ~ Edvard Munch
- “But whate’er you are That in this desert inaccessible, Under the shade of melancholy boughs, Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; If you have ever looked on better days, If ever been where bells knoll’d to church, If ever sat at any good man’s feast, If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be. . . .” ~ William Shakespeare
- “A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn.” ~ Hugh Mackay
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“The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson’s.” ~ Jonathan Coe
- “Tell us, pray, what devil This melancholy is, which can transform Men into monsters.” ~ John Ford
- “Melancholy is as seductive as Ecstasy.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end, we always feel melancholy.” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
- “As a remedy against all ills – poverty, sickness, and melancholy – only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work” ~ Charles Baudelaire
