"Melancholic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was twenty-five; by which time he had spent his money, laid in a handsome choice of debts, and acquired (like so many other melancholic and uninterested persons) a habit of gambling. An Austrian colonel—the same who afterwards hanged himself at Monte Carlo—gave him a lesson which lasted two-and-twenty hours, and left him wrecked and helpless. Old Singleton once ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a melancholic droop. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... illustration of which we find an anecdote, related with much vivacity, by Brillat-Savarin, in the "Physiology of Taste." The narrator is a M. Duhagel, who was the prior of a Carthusian monastery, and he thus tells us the story: "We had in the monastery in which I was formerly prior, a monk of melancholic temperament and sombre character, who was known to be a somnambulist. He would sometimes, in his fits, go out of his cell and return into it directly; but at other times he would wander about, until it became necessary to guide him back again. Medical advice was sought, and various remedies ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... clever, simple, well-mannered, and a little, I might say, melancholic in disposition. Though still under forty, he is surfeited with praise. As for his stories, they are—how shall I put it?—pleasing, full of talent, but if you have read Tolstoi or Zola you somehow don't ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... imagined, was not a little astonished and mortified at hearing from the usher, who returned looking foolish and chop-fallen, of this outbreak on the part of Jack, for whom he had really begun to conceive a sort of sneaking kindness; but knowing of old his fantastical and melancholic turn, he attributed this sally rather to the state of his bowels, which at all times he exceedingly neglected, and which, being puffed up with flatulency and indigestion to an extraordinary degree, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Peter used to retire and stroll about the gardens with his humble favorite, a Polish girl, forgetting the cares of state. This lowly companion, besides great personal beauty, possessed much force of character, and exercised great influence over her melancholic and morose master. Long before her final elevation to the throne, many instances are related of her interference in behalf of mercy, which showed a kind and loving nature. Peterhoff is the favorite summer ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... myself up as the horrid example of what comes of that sort of thing for men who have to work as you are doing and I have done. To be sure you are a "lungy" man and I am a "livery" man, so that your chances of escaping candle-snuff accumulations with melancholic prostration are much better. Nevertheless take care. The pitcher is a very valuable piece of crockery, and I don't want to live to see it cracked by going to the well ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... feeble were his spirits, and so low, And changed so, that no man coulde know His speech, neither his voice, though men it heard. And in his gear* for all the world he far'd *behaviour Not only like the lovers' malady Of Eros, but rather y-like manie* *madness Engender'd of humours melancholic, Before his head in his cell fantastic. And shortly turned was all upside down, Both habit and eke dispositioun, Of him, this woful lover Dan* Arcite. *Lord Why should I all day of his woe indite? When he endured had a year or two This cruel torment, and this pain and woe, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Indian, when not under the influence of intoxicating liquors, is grave, melancholic, and silent. The most violent passions are never depicted in his features; and it is sometimes frightful to see him pass, at once, from a state of apparent repose, to the most violent and unrestrained agitation. It is stated that these Indians have preserved, from their ancestors, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the horrible, I will gently slide into the pathetic and melancholic. There is our friend Atticus,—I call him so in public, because it would not do to name Brown right out, when telling his private griefs. Atticus, when he read a book lately, having "A man married is a man marred" for a motto, smiled a grim smile, and muttered audibly, "Mrs. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... just been saying! You have discoursed too well on all the signs, symptoms, and causes of this gentleman's disease. The arguments you have used are so learned and so delicate that it is impossible for him not to be mad and hypochondriacally melancholic; or, were he not, that he ought to become so, because of the beauty of the things you have spoken, and of the justness of your reasoning. Yes, Sir, you have graphically depicted, graphice depinxisti, everything that appertains to this disease. Nothing can be more learnedly, ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... pwesent? Me, I'm well. Yes, I'm always well, in fact. At the same time nevvatheless, I fine myseff slightly sad. I s'pose 'tis natu'al—a man what love the 'itings of Lawd By'on as much as me. You know, of co'se, the melancholic intelligens?" ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... was his counterpart and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more painful than pleasurable, all of its ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... Grecian, as I have said elsewhere; supplying the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his diligence. But to return: our two great poets, being so different in their tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and melancholic; that which makes them excel in their several ways is, that each of them has followed his own natural inclination, as well in forming the design, as in the execution of it. The very heroes show their authors; ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... patriotism, and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented himself with preaching a comfortable selfishness, and obtaining pleasure, made it rather his study to avoid pain. Doubtless both their theories were popular enough at Alexandria, as they were in France ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... example of how one can hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} A lexicon of Wagner's most intimate phrases—a host of short fragments of from five to fifteen bars ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... displaying an apparent phlegm, from which it would seem impossible to arouse them. This phlegmatic temperament lessens the credit of the men with the females, who uniformly prefer the European, or the still more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves to attach mystery even ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... like." And she took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for making her son like this. She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic. For this she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against the girl. Miriam had no friend of her own, only Paul. But she did not suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... procured us an audience. Then he remembered how he had laughed at my gambols with Molly O'Flaherty in the hayfield, and how they amused him, and how he thought my Romping ways might divert My Lady Duchess his Consort, who was a pining, puling, melancholic Temperament, and much afflicted with the Vapours, for want of something to do. So he was pleased to smile upon me again, and to give my mother five pounds, and to promise that I should be well bestowed in his household as a waiting-woman, or ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... not popular; he was unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day! Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge. He did this:—and the mystery puzzling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 1 In melancholic fancy, Out of myself, In the vulcan dancy, All the world surveying, Nowhere staying, Just like a fairy elf; Out o'er the tops of highest mountains skipping, Out o'er the hills, the trees, and valleys tripping, Out o'er ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... disease called acromegaly, which is due to a change in the pituitary gland, amongst other things are noted "melancholic tendencies, loss of memory and mental and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and various—influence, power, mystery, unhappiness, a broken heart. At Claremont his position was a very humble one; but the Princess took a fancy to him, called him "Stocky," and romped with him along the corridors. Dyspeptic by constitution, melancholic by temperament, he could yet be lively on occasion, and was known as a wit in Coburg. He was virtuous, too, and served the royal menage with approbation. "My master," he wrote in his diary, "is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of the globe; ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... endeavoured generally to make himself understood as far as possible by signs. Hence the kind of isolation in which he wished to pass the last months of his life, an isolation which many people wrongly interpreted—some attributing it to a scornful pride, others to a melancholic temper, the one as well as the other equally foreign to the character of this, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... spoke sorrowfully of the fact that the Professor was evidently again suffering severely. "There is a melancholy," said Goedike, "and it is the most usual, in which the inward depression easily changes to displeasure against every one, and the household of the melancholic suffers thereby intolerably; for the displeasure turns against them,—no one does anything properly, nothing is in its place. How very different is Gellert's melancholy! Not a soul suffers from it but himself, against himself alone his gloomy thoughts turn, and towards every ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... thereby to express that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which benumbs all our faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we are able to bear. And, indeed, the violence and impression of an excessive grief must of necessity astonish the soul, and wholly deprive her of her ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the cardinal died, and many gentlemen that served the Red Robe found themselves no longer in esteem, Gonzague passed at once into the circle of the king's most intimate friends. Gonzague, as the comrade of a ruling potentate, proved himself a master of all arts that might amuse a melancholic sovereign newly redeemed from an age-long tutelage, and eager to sate those many long-restrained pleasures that he was at last free to command. Gonzague's ambition appeared to be to play the Petronius part, to be the Arbiter of ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies. It cannot be said that as a people we are so positively sad, or morose, or melancholic as that we are vacant of that sportiveness and surplusage of animal spirits that characterized our ancestors, and that springs from full and harmonious life,—a sound heart in accord with a sound body. A man must invest himself near at hand and in common things, and be content with a steady ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... duties of that officer at the period, to be very strict in executing severity upon such Royalists as fell under his military charge. It appears that the Major, with a maiden sister who had kept his house, was subject to fits of melancholic lunacy, an infirmity easily reconcilable with the formal pretences which he made to a high show of religious zeal. He was peculiar in his gift of prayer, and, as was the custom of the period, was ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Degarchi, are as black as the natives of Canton or Ava. Climate is not, therefore, able to change the colour of a nation; but it seems to have a greater effect on the temperament. Cold can produce a change of temperament from the melancholic and choleric to the phlegmatic and sanguine, and heat acting on the human frame, is capable of producing a contrary revolution. Hence, rosy cheeks and lips are frequently observed among the mountain Hindus of Nepal, although they are ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... sir;—at Pie-corner, Taking your meal of steam in, from cooks' stalls, Where, like the father of hunger, you did walk Piteously costive, with your pinch'd-horn-nose, And your complexion of the Roman wash, Stuck full of black and melancholic worms, Like powder corns ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... ABOVE IT.—Cheer up! If you cannot think pleasurably over your misfortune, forget it. You must do this or perish. Your power and influence is too much to blight by foolish and melancholic pining. Your own sense, your self-respect, your self-love, your love for others, command you not to spoil yourself ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... when he sees me looking towards him. So! I have been burrowing in our boilers, testing the scale, inspecting stays and furnace crowns, and the joy of working has come back to me. I was solemn last evening, melancholic and somewhat metaphysical it seems; but let it stand. 'Tis morning, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—that Shakespeare may quite ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... In the Divinity School of Yale College, about the middle of the century, was a solemn, quiet, semi-jocose, semi-melancholic resident graduate—Alexander McWhorter. I knew him well. He had embarked in various matters which had not turned out satisfactorily. Hot water, ecclesiastical and social, seemed his favorite element.[29] He was generally believed ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... are involved in the disintegration of the brain. The difference between the effects of these two causes will hardly be great, but testimony dependent on this altered character of mental activity will have little reliability. Hallucinations, false memories, melancholic accusations of self, particularly, may also be explained in terms of such excitement. We criminalists have frequently to deal with people in above- named conditions, and when we receive intelligent answers from them we must never set them aside, but must carefully ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... books upon books than upon any other subject More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak More supportable to be always alone than never to be so More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit Most of my actions are guided by example, ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... sunshine of gladness has the best right to preside in our sky, is all wrong. It is absolutely wicked, because it casts a baneful influence upon all with whom we associate, and prepares us to go through life like a frowning cloud or a drooping willow, shading the circle of our influence with melancholic gloom. No, better sing with the birds and laugh with the babbling brooklets than be gloomy in Girlhood. Trials and troubles of course will come. We must sometimes weep, and when we do, it should be done with chastened spirits for real sorrow, that we may be the ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Scots, hearing of this disaster, was astonished; and being naturally of a melancholic disposition, as well as endowed with a high spirit, he lost all command of his temper on this dismal occasion. Rage against his nobility, who, he believed, had betrayed him; shame for a defeat by such unequal numbers; regret for the past, fear of the future; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... End halls are unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court, and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at the Bechstein, on a stifling June evening, that ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 'magnetic vellum, velin magnetique,' of the Sieurs d'Hozier and Petit-Jean, Parlementeers of Rouen. Sweet young d'Hozier, 'bred in the faith of his Missal, and of parchment genealogies,' and of parchment generally: adust, melancholic, middle-aged Petit-Jean: why came these two to Saint-Cloud, where his Majesty was hunting, on the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul; and waited there, in antechambers, a wonder to whispering Swiss, the livelong day; and even waited without ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... an old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of Melancholy (1676), wrote with reference to the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... near hitting the nail square on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,—the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... retreated to Durham. The king, with his army weakened and the treasury depleted, was in great straits. He was again constrained to call a parliament, which met on November 3, 1640. It had a sad and melancholic aspect. The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipage to Westminster, but went privately in his barge to the parliament stairs. The king being informed that Sir Thomas Gardiner, not having been returned a member, could not be chosen to be ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... "four temperaments" to the four great "humors" or fluids of the body. Thus the "sanguine" individual was one with a surplus of blood, the "choleric" had a surplus of bile, the "phlegmatic" a surplus of phlegm, and the "melancholic" a surplus of black bile or spleen; and any individual's temperament resulted from the balance of these four. Sometimes a fifth temperament, the nervous, was admitted, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... revolting deformity, such as is seen in Figure 100, representing an individual who was exhibited several years ago in Philadelphia. We have in English the expression, "pulling a long lip." Its origin is said to date back to a semimythical hero of King Arthur's time, who, "when sad at heart and melancholic," would let one of his lips drop below his waist, while he turned the other up like a ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... now a city of dazzling purity topped by steep roofs and domes of gold and azure and water-green, so filling the air with brightness that one minded less the persistent leaden gray of the vault overhead. But cold and grayness are bad companions for the morbid-melancholic; and Ivan took his tone from the clouds, steadily repulsing the gentle efforts of his friends to draw him from his dim retreat into sunny ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of Hingham, having been long in a sad melancholic distemper near to phrensy, and having formerly attempted to drown her child, but prevented by God's gracious providence, did now again take an opportunity.... And threw it into the water and mud ... She carried the child again, and threw it in so far as it could not get out; but then it pleased ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison in ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... choleric and passionate, and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a noble and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge of such things as if I ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Are you so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic. That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you it is a bad thing. I am not a good Christian. I am a good Italian, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... ask all the tyrants of thy sex if their fools are not known by this party-coloured livery. I am melancholic when thou art absent; look like an ass when thou art present; wake for thee when I should sleep; and even dream of thee when I am awake; sigh much, drink little, eat less, court solitude, am grown very entertaining ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... man of the Roman type, of medium height, thick set and naturally melancholic, with thin, straight lips that were clean shaven, straight black hair, a small but aggressively aquiline nose and heavy hands, hairy on the backs of the fingers, between the knuckles. His wife, Sora Nanna, said that he had a fist like a paving-stone. He also looked as though he might ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... of this sort furnishes little matter for conversation, so the Dutchmen of the Cape do not talk very much. They are a rather melancholic people, and they prefer to feel rather than to argue. So little happens, perhaps, that they have nothing to talk about; but what does it matter if the mind is empty when the heart is full, and when the tender emotions of nature can move it without ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... naturally feels for a discovery of his own. This kindly feeling (in some cases, at least) extended to the author, who, on the internal evidence of his sketches, came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literary traits. He is by no means certain that some of his subsequent ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... woke the next morning. There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night the next morning will show the other side to his nature. Thus with Mr. Tebrick, for as he had been beastly, merry and a very dare-devil the night before, so on his awakening was he ashamed, melancholic and a true penitent before his Creator. The first thing he did when he came to himself was to call out to God to forgive him for his sin, then he fell into earnest prayer and continued so for half-an-hour upon his knees. Then he got up and dressed but continued very melancholy for the whole of the ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett |
