These sullen quotes will inspire you. Sullen, bad-tempered and sulky; gloomy or a sulky or depressed mood.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging sullen quotes, sullen sayings, and sullen proverbs.
Best Sullen Quotes
- “Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it’s necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.” ~ Fiona Apple
- “The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.” ~ Julia Kristeva
- “What does it mean to love someone with all your heart? It means to love with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. Surely when you love your wife with all your heart, you cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her, or abuse her by words, sullen behavior, or actions.” ~ Ezra Taft Benson
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“How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another’s grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.” ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon
- “Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person” ~ Horace
- “Tell me not of joy: there’s none Now my little sparrow’s gone; He, just as you, Would toy and woo, He would chirp and flatter me, He would hang the wing awhile, Till at length he saw me smile, Lord! how sullen he would be!” ~ William Cartwright
- “There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.” ~ Edward Hoagland
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“The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.” ~ George A. Smith
- “Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.” ~ Robert E. Howard
- “We cannot pass our guardian angel’s bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.” ~ Saint Augustine
- “Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.” ~ Willa Cather
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“Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.” ~ Michael Ondaatje
- “All that philosophy can teach is to be stubborn or sullen under misfortunes.” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
- “Let the winds blow! a fiercer gale
Is wild within me! what may quell
That sullen tempest? I must sail
Whither, O whither, who can tell!” ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman -
“For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
- “‘The Queen Is Dead’ is not merely the Smiths’ best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.” ~ Rob Sheffield
- “Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.” ~ William Blake
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“No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.” ~ Alexander MacLaren
- “The universe is based on sullen entropy;
It falls apart as it goes on” ~ Robyn Hitchcock - “Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye–with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.” ~ Jack Kerouac
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“In the evenings there’s been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.” ~ John Donne
- “All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better. At night I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain. In summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its sides; but in winter always the same low, sullen growl.” ~ John Burroughs
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“To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “Magnus had often thought of getting a pet, but he had never considered acquiring a sullen teenage vampire. Once Raphael was gone, he thought, he was getting a cat. And he would always throw his cat a birthday party.” ~ Cassandra Clare
- “from the complications of loving you i think there is no end or return. no answer, no coming out of it. which is the only way to love, isn’t it? this isn’t a playground, this is earth, our heaven, for a while. therefore i have given precedence to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods that hold you in the center of my world. and i say to my body: grow thinner still. and i say to my fingers, type me a pretty song. and i say to my heart: rave on.” ~ Mary Oliver
- “… every available inch of his face busts into a smile – whoa. Has he blown into our school on a gust of wind from another world? The guy looks unabashedly jack-o’-lantern happy, which couldn’t be more foreign to the sullen demeanor most of us strove to perfect.” ~ Jandy Nelson
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“Sullen monosyllabism, a sure sign of sleep deprivation.” ~ Jim Butcher
- “They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers’ braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.” ~ Janet Fitch
- “She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass. Do you own a briefcase?” I ask her, swallowing.” ~ Bret Easton Ellis
- “What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich , Sullen quotes life
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“The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons — it was systemic and it was complete.” ~ Gary Shteyngart
- “Jem was safe from her, and he would ride away with a song on his lips and a laugh at her expense, forgetful of her, and of his brother, and of God; while she dragged through the years, sullen and bitter, the stain of silence marking her, coming in the end to ridicule as a soured spinster who had been kissed once in her life and could not forget it.” ~ Daphne du Maurier
- “Who did you pass on the road?” the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay. “Nobody,” said the Messenger. “Quite right,” said the King; “this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.” “I do my best,” the Messenger said in a sullen tone. “I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do!” “He can’t do that,” said the King, “or else he’d have been here first.” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Um,” Doc said in a mild voice, “medically speaking, I’m not sure that was the most helpful thing for his condition.” “But I feel better,” Jared answered, sullen. Doc smiled the tiniest smile. “Well, maybe a few more minutes of unconsciousness won’t kill him.” ~ Stephenie Meyer
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“From somber, serious sullen saints, save us, O Lord.” ~ Teresa Giudice
- “I do get bottled up in interviews. You’re thinking about what you’re saying, and suddenly you get all tangled. So people think I’m sullen, or that I don’t have much to say. But my friends will tell you: a lot of times I talk too much.” ~ Matt Dillon
- “The human genome will not help us to understand the spiritual side of humankind, or to know who God is or what love is. The well-heeled couple who decide they want to use genetics to have a child that is a gifted musician may end up with a sullen adolescent who smokes marijuana and doesn’t talk to them.” ~ Francis Collins
- “The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns;
The low’ring eye, the petulance, the frown,
And sullen sadness, that o’ershade, distort,
And mar the face of beauty, when no cause
For such immeasurable woe appears;
These Flora banishes, and gives the fair
Sweet smiles, and bloom less transient than her own.” ~ William Cowper -
“Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.” ~ Pauline Kael
- “The president of a TV network generously agreed to take his company’s aptitude test, a test required of all the personnel. He did badly. As a result he was in a sullen mood for the rest of the day. When he got home that night, his wife asked why he looked so grouchy. I took the company’s aptitude test this morning. What did it show? asked the wife. It showed, boomed the executive, that such tests are idiotic. That’s what it showed.” ~ Joey Bishop
- “When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness.” ~ Washington Irving
- “Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow,
And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow;
Thou canst help time to furrow me with age,
But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage.” ~ William Shakespeare -
“Oft, on a plat of rising ground, I hear the far-off curfew sound Over some wide-watered shore, Swinging low with sullen roar.” ~ John Milton
- “Too many have no idea of the subjection of their temper to the influence of religion, and yet what is changed, if the temper is not? If a man is as passionate, malicious, resentful, sullen, moody, or morose after his conversion as before it, what is he converted from or to?” ~ John Angell James
- “Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter: To what shall their rarity be likened? What prices shall count their worth? Perfect, and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches, No lovely thing on earth can picture their fair beauty. They be chance pearls, flung among the rocks by the sullen waters of Oblivion.” ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper
- “Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.
Come, mourn with me for what I do lament,
And put sullen black incontinent.
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.
March sadly after. Grace my mournings here
In weeping after this untimely bier.” ~ William Shakespeare -
“Winter is ruthless and sometimes sullen and murderous. The wild winter North has gulped ten thousand summers down nor left a froth of sunshine on its lips.” ~ William Alfred Quayle
- “Britannia’s shame! There took her gloomy flight, On wing impetuous, a black sullen soul . Less base the fear of death than fear of life. O Britain! infamous for suicide.” ~ Edward Young
- “God, deliver me from sullen saints.” ~ Teresa of Avila
- “The passion you forbade my lips to utter Will not be silenced. You must hear it in The sullen thunders when they roll and mutter: And when the tempest nears, with wail and din, I know your calm forgetfulness is broken, And to your heart you whisper, “He has spoken.”” ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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“Even so We find the sea of sorrow. Black as night The sullen surface meets our frightened gaze, As down we sink to darkness and despair.” ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- “The parent who loves his child dearly but asks for nothing in return might qualify as a saint, but he will not qualify as a parent. For a child who can claim love without meeting any of the obligations of love will be a self-centered child and many such children have grown up in our time to become petulant lovers and sullen marriage partners because the promise of unconditional love has not been fulfilled.” ~ Selma Fraiberg
- “How do we know, then, when a code’s been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.” ~ William H. Gass
- “I had kept opaque
Down deeper than the canyons undersea
The sullen spectrum of a buried lake
Nobody saw; not seen even by me.” ~ Allen Tate -
“Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “Philosophy is a proud, sullen detector of the poverty and misery of man. It may turn him from the world with a proud, sturdy contempt; but it cannot come forward and say, here are rest, grace, pardon, peace, strength, and consolation.” ~ Richard Cecil
- “There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him, in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “I was brooding, boy. Than which there is no richer pastime. It muffles one with rotting plumes. It gives forth sullen music. It is the smell of home.” ~ Mervyn Peake
- “No person who has not spent a period of his life in those ‘stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole’ will understand fully what trees and flowers, sun-flecked turf and running streams mean to the soul of a man” ~ Ernest Shackleton
- “All things that we ordained festival
Turn from their office to black funeral–
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a 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
