“Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 189 of 412
“Any philosophy worth taking seriously would have to be built upon a firm foundation of unyielding despair.”
“Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.”
“All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?”
“At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door.”
“I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.”
“You kill, it's part of your world as a bullfighter, it's a natural part of your world, and then you leave that world and it becomes unnatural.”
“I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.”
“There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.”
“If I hadn't gone through some of the painful experiences in my life, I would not be me.”
“Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end... To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.”
“One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.”
“To find recreation in amusement is not happiness.”
“Amusement allures and deceives us and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave”
“Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.”
“The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.”
“I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.”
“You can have your youth It'll rot before your eyes”
“Don't shed no tears, no woman, no cry.”
“That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.”