Sadness and Melancholy

The mass of men lead lives of quietdesperation. What is called resignation isconfirmed desperation.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

[T. S. Eliot achieves] the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

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!

Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?

My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.

History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.

The spirituals and the blues were not created out of sweet deceit. Spirituals and blues contain sublimated bitterness and humility, pathos and bewilderment.

When we sing the blues, we’re singing out our hearts, we’re singing out our feelings. Maybe we’re hurt and just can’t answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

Believe me, every heart has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.

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.

Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.