“Poverty hides itself in thought before it surrenders to purses.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 149 of 412
“Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.”
“Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.”
“The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.”
“So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection.”
“Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?”
“Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.”
“I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.”
“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.”
“Life is Quicker Than a Blink of an Eye”
“A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.”
“If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.”
“We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.”
“if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.”
“So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!”
“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.”
“Austere perseverance, hash and continuous... rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistible greater with time.”
“One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.”
“How much shall I be changed, before I am changed!”
“Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!”