“I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 147 of 412
“The average age (longevity) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.”
“With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.”
“Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.”
“Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.”
“While I was travelling and I kind of had the classic realisation - that I guess most teenagers have at some point - that time's gonna run out and that's not in my power to change that.”
“Thursday come, and the week's gone.”
“A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strength to tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom. I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist, a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down; it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees. Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.”
“In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.”
“What is forgotten cannot be healed, and that which cannot be healed easily becomes the cause of greater evil.”
“Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.”
“The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.”
“living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.”
“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again”
“Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.”
“Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses”
“It is not a sin to be seventy but it is also no joke.”
“Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.”
“If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.”
“Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.”