One must love life before loving its meaning ... yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
Over-anxiety ultimately banishes every trace of joy from life.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
I have been suffering for so long and didn't even recognize it. I just stopped doing so many things that I used to love to do due to my pain.
I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.
It is not the end of joy that makes old age so sad, but the end of hope.
People don't understand the devastation the murder of a child does to someone. Eighty percent of parents of murdered children wind up in divorce. The only thing you have in common is that horrible sadness. You can't see the joy of your previous life.
The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.
I have fun like a child in the street. When the day comes when I'm not enjoying it, I will leave football.
Life that only a few hours before had glowed with enthusiasm and exultation, suddenly paled and sickened.
Things that made me happy five, six years ago don't make me happy anymore.
Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.
If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.
Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing?
Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh Your change approaches, when all these delights Will vanish and deliver ye to woe, More woe, the more your taste is now of joy.
Sometimes we complain without thinking much of it, but the frightening thing about complaining is that every time we do, a cloud descends over our heart, and our hope, appreciation and joy gradually wane.
I don't like Johannesburg, where I grew up. Everybody lives in 'gated' buildings, is paranoid about crime and is always talking about being mugged. It's not a very joyful place.
Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.
80% of everything I've experienced since the Verve has been depressing.
I guess as you get older you sort of see the mechanics, even with the best comedians. There's admiration for people I admire, but it's not guttural laughter. It's a wry 'Oh, well done, sir.' But I sort of miss that slightly; I miss the raw joy of comedy I used to get.
But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
