Melancholy

Melancolia I, Albrecht Durer

Sourced

• Employment, sir, and hardships, prevent melancholy.
  • Samuel Johnson, reported in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1777).

• Moping melancholy,
  And moon-struck madness.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book XI, line 485.

• I can suck melancholy out of a song.
  • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act II, scene 5, line 12.

• O melancholy!
  Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
  The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
  Might easiliest harbour in?
  • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611), Act IV, scene 2, line 205.

• The greatest note of it is his melancholy.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act III, scene 2, line 53.

• And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.
  • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Induction, scene 2, line 135.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 505-06.

• All my griefs to this are jolly,
  Naught so damn'd as melancholy.
  • Robert Burton, Abstract to Anatomy of Melancholy.

• All my joys to this are folly,
  Naught so sweet as melancholy.
  • Robert Burton, Abstract to Anatomy of Melancholy.

• As melancholy as an unbraced drum.
  • Susanna Centlivre, Wonder, Act II, scene 1.

• With eyes upraised, as one inspired,
  Pale Melancholy sate retired;
  And, from her wild, sequester'd seat,
  In notes by distance made more sweet,
  Pour'd through the mellow horn her pensive soul.
  • William Collins, The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), line 57.

• Tell us, pray, what devil
  This melancholy is, which can transform
  Men into monsters.
  • John Ford, The Lover's Melancholy, Act III, scene 1, line 107.

• Melancholy
  Is not, as you conceive, indisposition
  Of body, but the mind's disease.
  • John Ford, The Lover's Melancholy, Act III, scene 1, line 111.

• Here rests his head upon the lap of earth,
  A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown;
  Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
  And Melancholy marked him for her own.
  • Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, The Epitaph.

• There's not a string attuned to mirth
  But has its chord in melancholy.
  • Thomas Hood, Ode to Melancholy.

• Go—you may call it madness, folly,
  You shall not chase my gloom away.
  There's such a charm in melancholy,
  I would not, if I could, be gay!
  • Samuel Rogers, To——, Stanza 1.

• Hence, all you vain delights,
  As short as are the nights
  Wherein you spend your folly!
  There's nought in this life sweet,
  If man were wise to see 't,
  But only melancholy,
  Oh, sweetest melancholy!
  • Dr. Strode, Song in Praise of Melancholy. As given in Malone's Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Manuscript No. 21. It appears in Dr. Strode's play, The Floating Island. Attributed to Fletcher, who inserted it in The Nice Valour, Act III, scene 3.

Unsourced

• 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

• ...melancholy is a fearful gift. What is it but the telescope of truth?
  • George Gordon, Lord Byron

• There are some people who think that they should be always mourning, that they should put a continual constraint upon themselves, and feel a disgust for those amusements to which they are obliged to submit. For my own part, I confess that I know not how to conform myself to these rigid notions. I prefer something more simple, which I also think would be more pleasing to God.
  • François Fénelon

• I once gave a lady two-and-twenty receipts against melancholy: one was a bright fire; another, to remember all the pleasant things said to her; another, to keep a box of sugar-plums on the chimney-piece and a kettle simmering on the hob. I thought this mere trifling at the moment, but have in after life discovered how true it is that these little pleasures often banish melancholy better than higher and more exalted objects; and that no means ought to be thought too trifling which can oppose it either in ourselves or in others.
  • Sydney Smith