25 Best Melancholy Quotes & Sayings about Feeling Melancholy

Best Melancholy Quotes

  • “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” —Susan Sontag
  • “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” —Victor Hugo
  • “Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.” —Emil M. Cioran
  • “The soulless have no need of melancholia.” —Vladimir Odoyevsky
  • “She seemed imprisoned in her sadness.” —Sena Jeter Naslund
  • “Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.” —Italo Calvino
  • “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.” —Virginia Woolf
  • “Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.” —Scott Turow
  • “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” —Rémy de Gourmont
  • “And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.” —Mircea Eliade
  • “At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.” —Arthur Golden
  • “So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.” —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
  • “Hands that never touch. Lips that never meet. The Almost Lovers, never to be.” —Rae Hachton
  • “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?” —Søren Kierkegaard
  • “It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.” —Tim Winton
  • “There’s a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night’s.” —Ed Gorman
  • “Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.” —Charles Nodier
  • “I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.” —Sylvia Plath
  • “A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.” —P.G. Wodehouse
  • “Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut…” —Sanhita Baruah
  • “That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.” —Robert Burton
  • “You felt a deep sorrow, the kind of melancholy you feel when you’re in a beautiful place and the sun is going down.” —Thrity Umrigar
  • “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 Keys
  • “Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed for a dream’s sake.” —Christina Rossetti
  • “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 Douglas Bradbury
  • “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.”
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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.” —Émile Durkheim
  • 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 Douglas Bradbury
  • “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
  • “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
  • “Rain is a lullaby heard through a thick, isolating blanket of clouds. It is the tinkling harp of water droplets; a moist breath whistling through willow reeds; a pattering beat background to the mourner’s melody. Rain is a soft song of compassion for the brokenhearted.” —Richelle E. Goodrich
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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 Wolfe
  • “And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.” —J.L. Carr
  • “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
  • “Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.” —Wilhelm Nero Pilate
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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 anything like analysis or explanation.” —Edgar Allen Poe

Melancholy Quotes and Sayings

  • “Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.” —Emil M. Cioran
  • “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” —Victor Hugo
  • “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” —Carl Jung
  • “Depression is melancholy minus its charms the animation, the fits.”
  • “Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.” —Italo Calvino
  • “There is a melancholy that stems from greatness.” —Nicolas Chamfort
  • “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.” —Virginia Woolf
  • “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.” —Edgar Allan Poe
  • “Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.” —Immanuel Kant
  • “The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.” —John Vance Cheney
  • “Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.” —Raheel Farooq
  • “It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.” —Charles Dickens
  • “Melancholy is not, as you conceive, indisposition of body, but the mind’s disease.” —John Ford
  • “Only tears can hear the sound of pain when warm blood reddens discolored stain.” —Munia Khan
  • “A tendancy to melancholy let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.” —Abraham Lincoln
  • “When sadness knows the reason of tears, heart prepares to carry the ache for years.” —Munia Khan
  • “No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.” —Jesse Ball
  • “My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.” —Søren Kierkegaard
  • Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don’t do melancholy. It’s a miserable way to be.” —Walter Mischel
  • “Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”
  • “The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.” —William C. Bryant
  • “Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt, doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.” —Comte de Lautreamont
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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
  • “It is Melancholy that causes those delightful tears to flow, and produces that melting disposition of the heart which is felt in the enjoyment of a pure pleasure, in the possession of a sweet and certain joy.” —Jeanne-Marie Roland