Famous quotes containing the word melancholy:
“Heaven nor hell shall impede my designs, said Manfred, advancing again to seize the princess. At that instant the portrait of his grandfather ... uttered a deep sigh and heaved its breast. ... Manfred ... saw it quit its panel, and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air.”
—Horace Walpole (17171797)
“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 a long time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another.... Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next.... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)