“I am bored. The great things are done. The German Reich is made.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 65 of 412
“"Existence is sorrow." Understand, and go beyond sorrow. This is the way of brightness.”
“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
“There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
“Of course, I also attribute some of my hearing loss to being in the infantry in World War II. It's probably a combination of heredity and noise exposure.”
“One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are”
“What is the crowning glory of your civilization... the symbol as clear a statement as the pyramids, the Parthenon, the cathedrals? What is this symbol? What is its name? Its name is Junk. Junk is the rusty, lovely, brilliant symbol of the dying years of your time. Junk is your ultimate landscape.”
“Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”
“When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future.”
“Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.”
“Time makes ancient good uncouth.”
“Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.”
“Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder, the coldness increases, responsibility increases.”
“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.”
“The heart's affections are divided like the branches of the cedar tree; if the tree loses one strong branch; it will suffer but it does not die; it will pour all its vitality into the next branch so that it will grow and fill the empty place.”
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.”
“The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.”
“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”
“Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.”
“Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.”