"Melancholia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his Knight and Death, and his Melancholia, as if those were his principal works. They are his characteristic ones, and show what he might have been without his anatomy; but they were mere by-play compared to his Greater Fortune, and Adam ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... as if I were dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could know that. There is a woman in this hospital whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous prostration, and melancholia. All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... could be. They are written by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called "sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of drugs, or in dreams and rare ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... distrusted his own powers after his first four years in the seminary. He more than ever lacked self-confidence. He was more than ever vacillating, hesitant, and infirm of purpose. He even at times, when under the pall of melancholia, wondered if he had really loved his deceased father, and whether it was real grief which he felt at his parent's demise. Often, too, when fear and doubt pressed heavily, and his companions avoided ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... tremor-cordia, retired nerves, ill vapours of the spleen, stopping of the liver, the stone, the strangury, hernia ventosa, iliaca passio; stops a disenteria immediately; easeth the torsion of the small guts: and cures melancholia hypocondriaca, being taken and applied according to my printed receipt. [POINTING TO HIS BILL AND HIS VIAL.] For, this is the physician, this the medicine; this counsels, this cures; this gives the direction, this works the effect; and, in sum, both together may be termed an abstract of the theorick ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... present century—the idea that insanity is brain disease, and that the treatment of it must be gentle and kind. In the sixth century Alexander of Tralles presented still more fruitful researches, and taught the world how to deal with melancholia; and, finally, in the seventh century, this great line of scientific men, working mainly under pagan auspices, was closed by Paul of Aegina, who under the protection of Caliph Omar made still further observations, but, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of vast means. Later she was to find herself often one of large and glittering companies where nothing imaginable was lacking to make one happy except the power to be happy. She would go to dinners where an acute melancholia seemed to poison the food, where people of the widest travel and unfettered opportunities could find nothing to say to ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... PRACTICE Early Legal Customs. Lincoln's Popularity in Law and Politics. A Speech in 1840. The Harrison Campaign. Correspondence with Stuart. Harrison Elected. Melancholia ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... potato-peeling and all manner of household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink; celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, dinner-parties; deaths, funerals, melancholia; and still celebrity; years, interminable, monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary workshop overpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; then death. And in the midst of it all, one small and ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... and the shepherd in the shape of Harut appeared looking, I reflected, the very picture of Abraham softened by a touch of the melancholia of Job, that is, as I have always imagined those patriarchs. He bowed to us with his usual Oriental courtesy, and we bowed back to him. Hans' bow, I may explain, was of the most peculiar nature, more like a skulpat, as the Boers call a land-tortoise, drawing its wrinkled ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... are very difficult to get. Julia is a patroness. Marian told her about this child of Marmaduke's; and it happened that a vacancy had just occurred at the Home in consequence of one of the girls dying of melancholia and spinal affection. Julia, who has perhaps more piety than tact, wrote to Marmaduke offering to present his daughter, and expatiating on the advantages of the Home to the poor little lost one. In her desire to reclaim Marmaduke ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... (1430-1480), persons who had been bitten by this reptile fell into a state of melancholia and stupefaction. While in this condition they were very susceptible to the influence of music. At the very first tone of a favorite melody, they sprang up, shouting for joy, and danced without intermission until they sank to ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... as good as a temple that morning. The sunlight was on the river and soft air came in through the open window; the walls showed a glorious silent cloud of witnesses—the Virgin soaring amid her cherubic escort; grand Melancholia with her solemn universe; the Prophets and Sibyls; the School of Athens; the Last Supper; mystic groups where far-off ages made one moment; grave Holbein and Rembrandt heads; the Tragic Muse; last-century children at their musings or their ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... and with the action of the heart. Such effects are explained through the close relation of the mind to the work of the nervous system in general. While certain emotional states, such as fear, anger, melancholia, and the impulse to worry, interfere seriously with the normal action of the nervous system, others, such as contentment, cheerfulness, and joy, are decidedly beneficial in their effects. How important, then, is the habit of suppressing the states that are harmful and of cultivating ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... past comfortable homes fronted with lawns and shaded by weeping willows. There is a peculiar melancholia about a May day; it had an effect on the young bankclerk. He walked by hedges beyond the end of Mt. Alban's asphalt out into the suburbs. Spring birds sang their thanks to Nature, and to the homesick heart a bird's singing is sadness. It is natural for such a heart to seek quiet. Evan had ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... his stay in Paris, when he was weary of everything, afflicted with hypochondria, the prey of melancholia, when his nerves had become so sensitive that the sight of an unpleasant object or person impressed itself deeply on his brain—so deeply that several days were required before the impression could be effaced—the touch of a human body brushing against him ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... carried away the last remnants of Barstein's melancholia; he saw his imagined statue showering adjectives from its cornucopia. 'It is the cry of a dictionary in distress!' he murmured, re-reading the letter ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... is criminal to be serious all the time; it kills the real life and leads to melancholia. You would grow morbid through your fears if I did not laugh at them sometimes, and it would never—never do for ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... obsessive may well bear in mind, namely, that known as manic-depressive. This disorder, in its typical form, is shown by recurring outbursts of uncontrollable mental and physical activity (mania), alternating with attacks of profound depression (melancholia). This form of insanity represents the inability to control an extreme degree of the varied moods to which we all are subject. Long before the modern classification of mental disorders, Burton, in his introduction to the "Anatomy of Melancholy," ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... his study, and how he had come across Doyle's notebook. He told it rather well; he had a reputation for that sort of thing, and to-night he did his best. He pictured himself to his audience on the verge of suicide from melancholia, and assured them that this fate had been averted only through his dislike of being found lifeless amid such untidy surroundings. He decked the narrative with touches of drollery, and was rewarded with the grins that overspread the faces of his hearers. Ailworth ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... melancholia refused to ebb. Indeed, it swelled and grew blacker. The remedy seemed to intensify the disease; a holiday but gave her time to possess her soul, and brood upon its stains, her childhood's scene but enabled her to measure the realities of her achievement against the visions of girlhood. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... was not the pinion to buffet with a wind like this, and indeed he was not explicitly called upon to do so. He sat sorrowfully in his study day by day, preparing the weekly sermon,—a gentle, pensive person, inclined in the best of weather to melancholia. If Mr. Langly had gone into arboriculture instead of into the ministry, he would have planted ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... "you'll certainly find yourself shot into outer darkness, if you don't alter your hand. You're recklessly transgressing the lesson set forth in the parable of the Talents. Don't you know it's wrong to bury yourself here, eating your own life away with melancholia, seeing that you're gifted as you are? Maestros, and highclass critics, and other unwholesomely cultured people, might possibly sit on you, or damn you with faint praise; but you could afford to take chance of that, for beyond ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... good in all the world for melancholia as walking, and the exercise of the imagination in planning something presently to be done, and soon the wrathful wretchedness had vanished from Mr. Polly's face. He would have to do the thing secretly and elaborately, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... least to Father Daly, who disapproved of letting one's thoughts brood upon hell; far better think of heaven. Too much brooding on hell engenders a feeling of despair, which was the cause of Sister Teresa's melancholia. Too intense a fear of hell has caused men, so it is said, to kill themselves. It seems strange, but men kill themselves through fear of death. "I suppose it is possible that fear of hell might distract the mind so completely—Well, let us not talk on these subjects. We were talking of—" ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... of Irish life. The scene is laid in the wilds of Connemara, where a man suffering from melancholia starts hunting over the mountains and the bogs. A seaside lodge close to him is taken by some strangers, and the plot of the book then turns on the lonely man, who has not spoken for years save when obliged to, being charmed from his loneliness by ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... connected with his name. Among the products of the etcher's needle which attest his activity in this direction are those masterpieces which have for centuries been at once the delight and the puzzle of artistic minds: the "Melancholia," "The Knight and the Devil," and "St. Jerome in his Cell." The most reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were intended to represent in allegorical style the three temperaments—the melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg, which was convened ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... black hair intertwined with golden fillets and curious clasps. She wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when she moved and was "cut," as to the neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Italians. She suggested a symbolic picture, something akin even to Durer's Melancholia, and was so perfect an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... the first time during his stay in Africa that this gloomy atmosphere seemed to envelop him. In fact, he was the subject of frequent attacks of melancholia which the many friends that he had ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... hopeless from the start. Few recover after two years of mental aberration. Omitting the hopeless cases, over forty per cent of the cases of insanity recover. About sixty per cent recover of the cases classed as melancholia and mania. Most recoveries occur during the first year of the disease; but depressed patients may emerge and recover after several ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... variety of pain, devotes considerable chapters to the causes, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of headache, hemicrania, epilepsy, catalepsy, analepsy, cerebral congestion, apoplexy and paralysis, phrenitis, mania and melancholia, incubus or nightmare, lethargy and stupor, lippothomia or syncope, sciatica, spasm, tremor, tetanus, vertigo, wakefulness, and ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... as he opened the carriage door for her, "you've got to rest at my house and have something to eat before you go to Nannie's; besides, you don't suppose I got you on here just to cheer her? You've got to cheer me, too! It's enough to give a man melancholia to live next to that empty house of yours, and you owe it to me to be pleasant—if you can be ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... Hsiu-ch'uean, from whom great things were expected, failed, in 1833, to secure the first degree at the usual public examination. Four years later, when twenty-four years of age, he made another attempt, only, however, to be once more rejected. Chagrin at this second failure brought on melancholia, and he began to see visions; and later on, while still in this depressed state of mind, he turned his attention to some Christian tracts which had been given to him on his first appearance at the examination, but which he had so far allowed to ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, in the care of his numerous pets, and in writing his poems, his translation of Homer, and his charming letters. His two best known poems were suggested by a lively ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... he was dissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in Fleet Street." For the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not even ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... with his companionship? But if Captain Puffin had to be missed, she would certainly have chosen Major Benjy to be the person who missed him. Without wishing Captain Puffin any unpleasant experience, she would have borne with equanimity the news of his settled melancholia, or his permanent dizziness, for Major Benjy with his bright robustness was not the sort of man to prove a willing comrade to a chronically dizzy or melancholic friend. Nor would it be right that he should be so. Men in the prime of life were not meant for that. Nor were they meant to be ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... choler, and melancholy (see Burton's Anat. of Mel. i. 1, Sec. ii. 2): "Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, begotten of the more feculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen"; Gk. melancholia, black bile. See Sams. Agon. 600, "humours black That mingle with thy fancy"; and Nash's Terrors of the Night (1594): "(Melancholy) sinketh down to the bottom like the lees of the wine, corrupteth the blood, and is the ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... finally telling her that he was going into a bad country to kill Mexicans, that women were a burden on a warrior, and that he had made up his mind to kill her. All through her narrative he seemed at times to be overcome with this blood-thirst, which took the form of a homicidal melancholia. She begged so hard for her life that he relented; so he left her in the wild tangle of mountains while he raided on the Mexican settlements. He came back with horses and powder and lead. This last was in Winchester bullets, ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... the Princess D'Agramont entered she was surprised and overjoyed to find her patient sitting up on her couch for the first time in many days, talking quietly with the Perseus she had sent to rescue the poor Andromeda from the jaws of a brooding Melancholia which might have ended in madness or death. With her presence the conversation took a lighter tone—and by-and-by Angela found herself listening with some interest to the reading of her father's last letter addressed to ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... testicles I saw on several occasions. I remember only one out of some half-dozen in which castration became necessary. I was told of one case, for the accuracy of which I cannot vouch, in which destruction of one testicle was followed by an attack of melancholia, culminating in the suicide of ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... of existence at Florence was the vast increase of insanity. We had many insane men at Andersonville, but the type of the derangement was different, partaking more of what the doctors term melancholia. Prisoners coming in from the front were struck aghast by the horrors they saw everywhere. Men dying of painful and repulsive diseases lined every step of whatever path they trod; the rations given them were repugnant to taste and stomach; shelter from the fiery sun there ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... might have been one—very easily. The veiled, mournful eyes did not evade his; indeed, they appeared to stare deeply, hopelessly, yearningly. If he could only say and do the right thing to kill that melancholia. She needed to be made to live. Suddenly he had the impulse to kiss her. That, no doubt, was owing to the proximity of her lips. But he must not kiss her. She might care for him some day —it was natural to imagine ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... doubted that, whatever the precise mechanism by which the effects are produced, constipation does result in a lowering of the resistance to disease. More frequent fits, colic, foul breath, headache right across the forehead, lost appetite, drowsiness, skin eruptions, irritability, insomnia, melancholia and anaemia (especially the "green sickness" of women, usually connected with menstrual irregularities) are but a few of many ills partly or wholly due to or consequent ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... father by a wild and for the instant perfectly heartfelt determination to go and be a "movie" actress. There was no dancing that night. Gloria, when they thought her upstairs, sat alone out in the gloaming, a wistful, drooping little girl surrendering sweepingly to youthful melancholia. She didn't know just what the matter was; she didn't seek for reasons and explanations; she merely stared at the far-off stars which swam in a blue blur, and ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the exact nature of madness, and has ever been termed so by people who have looked at things merely by what they have seen. In the highly-feverish state of the brain the nerves of the whole system soon become involved, the stomach refuses to perform its functions, and physical emaciation and deep melancholia rapidly ensue. The obvious reason is the insane state of the brain. Nature has suddenly impressed that organ with the one idea that a certain fair maid is actually without the faults of her associates. She is ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... of Dr. Cathcart, that a man had yielded to the singular seduction of the Solitudes and gone out of his mind; Defago, moreover, was predisposed to something of the sort, for he already had a touch of melancholia in his blood, and his fiber was weakened by bouts of drinking that often lasted for weeks at a time. Something on this trip—one might never know precisely what—had sufficed to push him over the line, ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... cherry. It is at home in full sunshine where it will form a broadly rounded, bushy plant about three feet in diameter and, when in full bloom, with its myriad of black-eyed flowers, it can dispel the worst case of melancholia a dyspeptic ever enjoyed. It requires a good open, rather light soil to do itself justice. If lifted when in full bloom, put into a ten-inch pot, well soaked at the roots, and set aside for a ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... concerned, than either Mr. Hamar or Mr. Curtis, but as Mr. Kelson was engaged, she had consulted Mr. Edward Curtis instead. The latter had given her a spell which he had assured her would have the desired effect, but directly she got home, her adored Brutus developed melancholia, and died raving mad, after having bitten her child, who, by the way, had ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell |
