Sadness and Melancholy
Bertolt Brecht
Truly, I live in dark times! The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs Has simply not yet had The terrible news.
Rachel Carson
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
John Milton
Hence, loathed Melancholy, Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn, ’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate, Who ne’er the mournful midnight hours Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers. 3
Matthew Arnold
Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!
Charlotte Brontë
The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.
Gérard de Nerval
I am the somber one, the unconsoled widower, The Prince of Aquitaine whose tower was destroyed. 2 My only star is dead, and my star-studded lute Wears the black sun of Melancholy.
Matthew Arnold
Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.
Walt Whitman
Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
