• “There was so much sadness in everything, even when things worked.”

    — Charles Bukowski

  • When not depressed he was an amusing companion, “very merry, facete, and juvenile”, and a person of “great honesty, plain dealing, and charity”.

    Robert Burton

  • If God’s grace is lacking, a man can be placed in the most beautiful place, surrounded by all the benefits of the world, and he will still be unhappy.

    —Metropolitan Onuphry

  • Kierkegaard seems to have genuinely loved Olsen but was unable to reconcile the prospect of marriage with his vocation as a writer, his passionate, introspective Christianity and his constant melancholy.

    …

    Kierkegaard would remain a celibate bachelor for the rest of his life.

    Regine Olsen

  • …one arrives at asceticism by way of an original intellectuality because one sees into the misery of everything or, more properly, the misery which is existence, or is brought through suffering to the point where it seems a relief to let the whole thing come to a breaking point, breaking with everything, with existence itself – that is, with the desire for existence (asceticism, mortification)…

    —Søren Kierkegaard

  • That which others hear or read of, I felt and practiced myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholising.

    —Gaius Marius
    via Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

  • Two main reasons may be given of it, why students should be more subject to this malady [melancholy] than others. The one is, they live a sedentary, solitary life, sibi et musis, free from bodily exercise, and those ordinary disports which other men use: and many times if discontent and idleness concur with it, which is too frequent, they are precipitated into this gulf on a sudden: but the common cause is overmuch study; too much learning (as Festus told Paul) hath made thee mad; ’tis that other extreme which effects it.

    SUBSECT. XV.– Love of Learning, or overmuch study. With a Digression on the misery of Scholars, and why the Muses are Melancholy.

    The Anatomy of Melancholy
    Robert Burton

  • Tis my sole plague to be alone,
    I am a beast, a monster grown,
    I will no light nor company,
    I find it now my misery.
    The scene is turn’d, my joys are gone,
    Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
    All my griefs to this are jolly,
    Naught so fierce as melancholy.

    The Anatomy of Melancholy
    Robert Burton

  • Therefore I beseech Your Excellency, asking for a great favor that you take great care to amend the infirmity of your body. For despondency can produce physical illness; and when the body is in pain and great weakness, when it is completely neglected, and when it is deprived of doctors, temperate weather, and an abundance of daily necessities, consider how not a little aggravation of distress is caused thereby.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • Hence, the rewards for these pains and this despondency were much greater. “For each one will receive his own wages,” it says, “according to his own toil.” I will not stop saying this continually.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia