This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time.
Labor | Melancholy | Object | Pain | Pleasure | Time | Wisdom |
If there is a hell upon earth it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.
Earth | Heart | Hell | Man | Melancholy |
There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness.
Cause | Idleness | Melancholy |
Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy soul; he will be sure to aggravate thy adversity, and lessen your prosperity. He goes always heavy loaded; and thou must bear half. He is never in a good humor; and may easily get into a bad one, and fall out with thee.
Adversity | Friend | Good | Humor | Melancholy | Prosperity | Soul | Will |
Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy soul: he'll be sure to aggravate thy adversity, and lessen thy prosperity. He goes always heavy loaded; and thou must bear half. He's never in a good humor; and may easily get into a bad one, and fall out with thee.
Adversity | Friend | Good | Humor | Melancholy | Prosperity | Soul |
Dmitri Shostakovich, fully Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half.
Melancholy | Friends |
I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.
Fear | Future | Melancholy | Nothing | Past |
Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.
Action | Melancholy | Need |
Maurice Chevalier, fully Maurice Auguste Chevalier
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.
Age | Better | Eternal | Melancholy | Old age | Reward | Youth | Youth | Old |
And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.
Morris West, fully Morris Langlo West
I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake.
Better | Contemplation | Melancholy | Music | Sound | Time | Contemplation |
Kafū Nagai, pen name for Nagai Sōkichi
It has been four years since I commenced this life of solitude, living in the maid's room and cooking for myself. At first there was a certain novelty in the arrangement. Then, toward the end of last year, the ways of the military government began to grow more arbitrary, and there came a change in the world; and somehow the drab and inconvenient life of the bachelor has come to seem so appropriate to the moods of the days that I would not now find it easy to change. Indeed, my feelings and thoughts are quite beyond description when, on an evening of a sudden autumn rain, I drag my sandals along the cliff, taking care that the frayed thong does not break, and buy onions and radishes in Tanimachi. I am quite drunk with the melancholy poetry of it all. However malicious and arbitrary may be the ways of the government, it cannot keep one's fancies from running free. There will be freedom while there is life.
Care | Change | Feelings | Freedom | Government | Inconvenient | Life | Life | Melancholy | Novelty | Poetry | Will | Government | Novelty |
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
There is a melancholy that stems from greatness of mind.
Greatness | Melancholy |
Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Despair | Melancholy | Pleasure | Sorrow | Sympathy | Tragedy |
Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington
We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.
Melancholy | Need | Tears |
Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy.
Melancholy | Men | Present |