This is a special kind of depression. It comes from the great burden laid on our shoulders. A depression you can't shake off, so that it is part and parcel of you all the time you go on with your military activities. This depression leads to melancholy. It's od to point to somebody young and say: there goes a sad man. That is our lot. One of the things that weighs me down most is that it's forbidden to speak of this sadness outside the limits of the army. In fact, I'm forbidden to share it with anyone. The main reason is the secrecy that surrounds everything that has to do with the military. In order to explain the depression, you have to talk about its origins, and that's prohibited, of course. Another reason is that it's almost impossible to explain the nature of this sadness to anyone who doesn't know it; the sadness will always be interpreted as something else. Within itself it's not mentioned-- It exists, but for each man separately. it is never discussed. Thus another factor comes into the picture-- loneliness. But loneliness, sadness and depression are the lot of great masses of people in this world. Well, then, What kind of God-forsaken world are we living in? It contains so much beauty, so much grandeur and nobility- but men destroy everything that is beautiful in the world. It seems, indeed, that from time immemorial we have been forgotten by the Gods.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

A strangely reflective even melancholy day. Is that because unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn?

I pray God I may never be brought to the melancholy trial but if ever I should it will then be known how far I can reduce to practice principles which I know to be founded in truth.

We may smile at these matters but they are melancholy illustrations.

The company of fools may first make us smile but in the end we always feel melancholy.

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

To me the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful sorrowful thing. It's more reflective it reminds you to feel.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good bad and indifferent e.g. music is good to the melancholy bad to those who mourn and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

It's true there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy one has a success but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time it's just wonderful.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

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.

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces primarily by TV commercials.

All changes even the most longed for have their melancholy for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves we must die to one life before we can enter another.