"Melancholia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mania melancholia scribo, ut sciam quo pacto in hominibus gignatur, fiat, crescat, cumuletur, minuatur; haec inquit animalia quae vides propterea seco, non Dei opera perosus, sed ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... bequeathed his house to his only unmarried daughter, Catherine. She married later, and sold the house in 1873 and regretted it bitterly, to such an extent that she went into melancholia and committed suicide by taking poison. For a while it was Miss Lipscomb's School for Young Ladies, then it was bought by John D. Smoot, and his family lived there ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... dashing about in his aerial chase for insects, no one would accuse him of melancholia. He keeps an eye on the "main chance," whatever his preying grief may be, and never allows it to affect his appetite. Returning to his perch after a successful sally in pursuit of the passing fly, he repeats his "sweetly solemn thought" over and ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... epilepsies, 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; ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... of Pathological Material Dementia Praecox Paranoic Conditions Epilepsy General Paresis Manic-Depressive Insanity Involutional Melancholia; Alcoholic Dementia; Senile Dementia ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... sentiments are not those of the Middle Ages." The exercises of St. Ignatius did not appeal in the 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 ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... parted 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, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... funny you are. I don't know much about Byron, but I kind of think you're trying to do the old melancholia act: Manfred or what d'you call 'em? You just stand there like old style opera, glowering; if you had a cloak you'd throw an ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... be caught—It was only in the vast melancholia of such occasions that Mr. Britling would admit such possibilities, but we might be caught by some sudden declaration of war.... And ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... a painter we have already spoken; but he excelled also as an engraver on copper, and his prints of "Adam and Eve," "Melancholia," and the small "Life of Christ," have not been surpassed. To him also we owe the invention of etching; he practised the art on iron and on copper, and it is impossible to overvalue its utility. In addition to his other labours he executed ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... —— Jail, a few hours after her tragic death, and before he could possibly have heard of it by the ordinary channels; and that he was sent to —— Asylum, where, after his frenzy had subsided, he remained for many days in a state of suicidal melancholia, until, to the surprise of all, he rose one morning in high spirits, and apparently cured of all serious symptoms of insanity; so he remained until his death. It was during the last year of his life that he wrote his ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... or Monomania, also called Melancholia, is a form of the disease in which the patient becomes possessed of some single notion, contradictory alike to common-sense ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... Hoelderlin's mind was intensely introspective. This is true also of Lenau, even to a greater extent, and may be taken as generally characteristic of poets of this type. The fact that this introspection is an inevitable symptom in many mental derangements, hypochondria, melancholia and others, indicates a not very remote relation of Weltschmerz to insanity. In Hoelderlin's poems there are not a few premonitions of the sad fate which awaited him. One illustration from the poem "An ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... June. "Don't you start having instincts too! It's bad enough for me to have them. What can happen to you, pray, unless you get melancholia or something?" ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... worse—more profound, radical, acute—and simply absolutely hypnotizing others into thinking so, too. Christendom is just beginning to rediscover that there is such a thing as faith, that it is just possible that, say, megrims or melancholia may be removed at least as easily as mountains. The converse, of course, is obvious on the face of it. A man fails because he thinks himself a failure. It's the men that run away that lose the battle. Suppose then, Lawford'—he leaned forward, keen and suave—'suppose ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... men. It is the eye of talent, or impressibility. The large, open, transparent eye, of whatever color, is indicative of elegance, of taste, of refinement, of wit, of intelligence. Weakly marked eyebrows indicate a feeble constitution and a tendency to melancholia, Deep sunken eyes are selfish, while eyes in which the whole iris shows indicate erraticism, if not lunacy. Round eyes are indicative of innocence; strongly protuberant eyes of weakness of both mind and body. Eyes small and close ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... 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 remain unread. ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... member of the family, and the amount of company or entertainment allowed must be decided for the individual patient. The patient must be distinctly individualized and the proper measures taken to give mental and physical rest, to prevent excitement, worry, melancholia and depression, and to improve the general nutrition of the body as well as the condition ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... ulcers of the bowels and excessive thirst." Q "What are the symptoms of black bile and what hath the patient to fear from it, an it get the mastery of the body?" "The symptoms are false appetite and great mental disquiet and cark and care; and it behoveth that it be evacuated, else it will generate melancholia[FN402] and leprosy and cancer and disease of the spleen and ulceration of the bowels." Q "Into how many branches is the art of medicine divided?" "Into two: the art of diagnosing diseases, and that of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... a similar condition of maniacal excitement for some time preceding and during a Parliamentary election, but afterwards they usually manifested that modification of insanity which is called melancholia. In fact they alternated between these two forms of the disease. During elections, the highest state of exalted mania; and at ordinary times—presumably as a result of reading about the proceedings in Parliament of the persons whom they had elected—in ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... I think he might have become the real successor to Tolstoi, a title that has been bestowed upon Chekhov, Gorki, and Andreev, and has not yet been earned by any man. But like nearly all Russian authors, he suffered from intense melancholia, and in 1888 committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. His short story "Four Days on the Field of Slaughter" first brought him into public notice. One cannot read Andreev's "Red Laugh" to-day ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... disorganization, when the individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual, in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the novel and the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... grew alarmed. He feared the minister would lose his reason in a helpless melancholia. The children were heart-broken. All their efforts to comfort and distract their father fell down hopeless from the mask of ice, behind which they saw him like a spirit in prison. Daniel and Ruth were ready to give up in despair. But Esther still ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Tongue," as derived from the word attor, poison; also Wall-fern, and formerly in Anglo-Saxon Ever-fern, or Boar-fern. In Germany it is said to have sprung from the Virgin's milk, and is named Marie bregue. The fresh root has been used successfully in decoction, or powdered, for melancholia; [190] also of late for general rheumatic swelling of the joints. By the ancients it was employed as a purgative. Six drachms by weight of the root should be infused for two hours in a pint of boiling water, and given in two doses. This is the Oak Fern of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... strength, in exercise, recreation, eating and sleeping. Saul was a cowboy before he was a King; and young David in his music takes the great monarch back to the happy carefree days on the pasture, before the responsibilities of the crown had given him melancholia. The effect of music on patients suffering from nervous depression is as well known now as it was in Saul's day; Shakespeare knew something about it. His physicians are sometimes admirable; the great nervous specialist called in on Lady Macbeth's case is a model ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... him not a few of the radical theories containing the problematic fourth dimension. He read with avid interest of J. K. F. Zoellner's experiments which drove that unfortunate Leipzig physicist into incurable melancholia. Ah, what madmen these! Perpetual motion, squaring the circle, the fourth spatial dimension—all new variants of the old alchemical mystery, the vain pursuit of the philosophers' stone, the transmutation of the baser ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... all the thousand little trivial things that made up the course of his life and in which he found diversion and amusement palled upon him. A fearful melancholia settled over him, a despair, an abhorrence of living that could not be uttered. This only was during the day. It was that night that Vandover went down into ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... but every day she came over to the camp, and really was almost like a young girl herself, so great was her joy in the sudden restoration of her daughter's health. It developed that the sick girl's case had been one of pure melancholia, following a shock of grief, and that her association with Dorothy and her friends was the one thing she most needed. The second shock, in falling, ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... Sociability. Life in Factories.—The social relations of man exert a great influence on sexual life. Hermits and those who live on isolated farms are interesting in this respect. Solitude generally leads man to chronic melancholia and to abnormal peculiarities, unless he has a library in his hermitage, when he may live in the spirit of the intellectual sociability derived from the study ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... or spend an evening alone rather than 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 ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... 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 ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... 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 ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... replied Trublet, "because she loved another. The obsession of genetic images frequently determines mania and melancholia." ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... Perotti (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 ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... presentations are much sought after, and 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 also, she entrusted the letter to George, who undertook to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... that most concern us now) as sanely conceived and expressed as any letters 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 ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... novel 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 Sally Stannard, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... time—before Angela came to live with him—and Janet counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind—perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her characteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... home. He had a report of the journey to Italy, and of succeeding events, including his arrival at Constantinople, ready draughted, and was impatient to forward it. A word of approval from Mahommed would be to him like a new spirit given. He counted upon it as a cure for his melancholia. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... are also known to interfere with breathing 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, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... step from which 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
... son of a clergyman, was born at Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, Eng., Nov. 15, 1731, and died at Dereham, Norfolk, April 25, 1800. Through much of his adult life he was afflicted with a mental ailment inducing melancholia and at times partial insanity, during which he once attempted suicide. He sought literary occupation as an antidote to his disorder of mind, and besides a great number of lighter pieces which diverted him and ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... hysteria; again it takes the form of hypochondria or chronic blues. The hypochondriac has a chronic, morbid anxiety about personal health and personal welfare. Frequently this state is accompanied by melancholia. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... entail insurmountable obstacles for the ballet, which had to be given each time. In place of this Dessauer wished me to compose him an oratorio on 'Mary Magdalene.' As on the day that he expressed this wish he appeared to be suffering from acute melancholia, so much so that he declared he had that morning seen his own head lying beside his bed, I thought well not to refuse his request. I asked him, therefore, to give me time, and I regret to say that ever since that day I have continued ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... flood of language 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, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... nothing so 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, because otherwise there might be difficulties about the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... The slightest allusion to the terrible incident sent her into delirium, and the arrest of Robert Darzac which followed on the day following the tragic death of the keeper seemed to sink her fine intelligence into complete melancholia. ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... felt overcome by that overpowering sense of misery and languor that takes possession of one from time to time. I was in my own apartment, all alone, and I was convinced that if I gave in to my feelings I should have a terrible attack of melancholia, one of those attacks that lead to suicide when they recur ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... body, viz. blood, phlegm, 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 ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling in the ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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 The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and Uriel, the lonely, prematurely aged, found himself sinking into melancholia. He craved for human companionship, and the thought that he could find it save among Jews never occurred to him. And at last he humbled himself, and again ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Her dress was neglected, and her hair unbrushed: indeed, when Janetta was too busy to give her a daughter's loving care, as it was her custom and her pleasure to do, poor Mrs. Brand roamed about the house looking like a madwoman. Her madness was, however, of a gentle kind: it took the form of melancholia, and manifested itself chiefly by continual restlessness and occasional ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... themselves with themselves, cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they go, have suddenly stopped in a book—have purged away jealousy and despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be—who merely goes about reminding people how sad ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... an adaptation of tho old magic square, which amused the philosophers of old. A sketch of it appears in Albert Durer's painting of Melancholia. Sixteen discs or squares, numbered from 1 to 16, are placed indifferently on the table—or they may be in the fifteen box; and the puzzle is to so arrange them as to make the sum of the figures add up to 34, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... He became a virtuoso in love and had a genius for friendship. But he was not always cheerful. In his youth, particularly, he was often moody and given to brooding over indefinable woes. He suffered acutely at times from what is now called the melancholia of adolescence. This was a phase of that emotional sensitiveness and nervous instability which are nearly always a part ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and looked at his aunt, holding her hand. His eyes were unfeignedly happy, and his companion matched his eyes. Neither seemed to recollect that one was bitterly angry, and that the other was on the verge of melancholia. Instead, Jack declared fervently: ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner |
