Quotes About Melancholia

Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility?

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of narcissistic psychoneuroses for these disorders.

You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.

I had come into this affair with my eyes open, knowing that one day this must end, and yet, when the sense of insecurity, the logical belief in the hopeless future descended like melancholia, I would badger her and badger her, as though I wanted to bring the future in now at the door, an unwanted and premature guest.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.' Auden noted: 'Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep.

I was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.

How she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth! If her childhood had been spent in the dark back-room of a shop in some town, she would now perhaps have been kindled by the lyric surgings of nature which only normally reach us as through the interpretation of a writer.

The script for 'Infamous' was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It's a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good... I remember thinking, 'Oh, this script is too good. They'll never give it to me.'

A symbolic unity formed by the languor of the fluids, by the darkening of the animal spirits and the shadowy twi­light they spread over the images of things, by the viscosity of the blood that laboriously trickles through the vessels, by the thickening of vapors that have become blackish, deleterious, and acrid, by visceral functions that have be­come slow and somehow slimy-this unity, more a product of sensibility than of thought or theory, gives melancholia its characteristic stamp.

Hermann Boerhaave still defined melancholia as merely a long persistent delirium without fever, during which the sufferer is obsessed by only one thought.

Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania?

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

I am the Dark One, – the Widower, – the Unconsoled The Aquitaine Prince whose Tower is destroyed: My only star is dead,- and my constellated lute Bears the black Sun of Melancholia.

Elisabeth "has always been strange and has followed only her whims and wishes, and now shyness and melancholia have been added. Who among gifted people who enjoy unlimited freedom is entirely normal? The Empress is, as we all are, the product of conditions." (Bavarian lady-in-waiting)

the history of melancholia includes all of us.

Thus, melancholia arises when there is failure to recognize the traumatic nature of the wound causing pain.

Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, Hic jacet Democritus Junior, Cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia Known to few, unknown to even fewer, Here lies Democritus Junior, To whom Melancholia Gave life and death.

Any man who yields habitually to melancholia may expect his brain, sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and painful indications of the end for a long space before it arrives. The indications, as a rule, will assume the form of visions and dreams and wild imaginings of various sorts. Now do you understand me?

I've always felt that Americans are very in the moment. There's not so much melancholia and mystery as there is in France. Everything must be understood. Everything must be analyzed.

Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.

I love the Russians for their verve, their melancholia, their vivacity, their unpredictability, and their humour.