Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I've studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they're just different names for loneliness. That's what lets the darkness in. That's what you have to fight.

I never define depression, clinical or otherwise. It's the basis of most life, it seems to me, in the modern world. We're all depressed.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.

I didnt like being reminded about how self-absorbed i was. I wanted to be over this, done with this. I didnt want to live in a broken world or a broken me. I wasnt trying to weasel out of anything. I just wasnt in the mood of being on the earth that night. I get like that sometimes when it rains, or when i see certain sad movies.

I imagine there's a market for total depression. I grew up on George Jones and that really dark stuff.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

I'm just sittin here trying not to be unhappy.

Men are much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.

I wanted to understand pain and the human condition, which is full of pain and regret and sadness - and some happiness, if you're lucky.

The flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read all the books.

Most of life is sad.

There's definitely sadness happening in this band. I get melancholy every day about things.

As a boy and even now, I am wont to melancholy. I do, probably once a day, experience a sincere heartbreak.

If a documentary crew were to follow me around, they'd probably think they were making a film about the saddest person in the world.

I was always very depressed, even when I was a youngster.

'Melancholy' is prettier than 'depression'; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.