Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that life is inherently difficult for everyone and that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience. It is not a disorder that needs to be cured; it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgement of how much pain we must inevitably all travel through.
THE BOOK OF LIFE, CHAPTER 5: CULTURE: TRAVEL, The Wisdom of Nature
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Unmotivated Sadness
St. John Cassian tells us that ‘it sometimes happens that we are suddenly filled with an anxiety that has no cause; we feel overwhelmed by a sadness for which no motive can be found.’ He also says that there are two different kinds of sadness: the first consists of all those varieties considered above, ‘the second comes from unreasonable mental anguish or despair.’
Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet -
Melancholy, if you’re doing it right, can be deeply, profoundly satisfying. Like Victor Hugo once wrote, “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” If that sentence doesn’t ring true, you have never been melancholy. You’ve just been vaguely blue.
You Won’t Find Happiness Without Deep, Dark Sadness -
When not depressed he was an amusing companion, “very merry, facete, and juvenile”, and a person of “great honesty, plain dealing, and charity”.
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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.
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Kierkegaard would remain a celibate bachelor for the rest of his life.
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…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
SO GOOD QUOTES 