Varieties of Melancholy Quotes

“There is really only one question you ever need to direct at someone to work out whether or not they are a good person, and that is, with deliberate simplicity: Do you think you are a good person? And to this there is only one acceptable answer. People who are genuinely good, people who know about kindness, patience, forgiveness, compromise, apology and gentleness always, always answer: no.

One cannot both be a good person and at the same time feel totally blameless and pure inside. Goodness is, one might say, the unique consequence of a keen awareness of one’s capacity to be bad: that is, to be thoughtless, cruel and self-righteous. The price of being genuinely good has to be a constant suspicion that one might be a monster – combined with a fundamental hesitation about labelling anyone else monstrous.

Only properly bad people don’t lie awake at night worrying about their characters. It has generally never occurred to the most difficult or dangerous people on the planet that they might be awful. It is a grim paradox that the worst deeds that humans have ever been guilty of have been carried out by people with an easy conscience, people who felt they were definitely on the side of angels.

The melancholy have advanced knowledge of their impurity, and are experts in their own sinfulness. They can’t forget how silly they have been at many moments and with what lack of thought they have treated others. This self-knowledge isn’t fun, but it keeps them very honest.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Self-acceptance can feel impossible when perfection is meant to be the norm.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“We don’t need to be aliens of the future to understand all this. We can see the disaster scenario only too well right now. The fate of civilisation lies ultimately not in the law courts”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“We can’t laugh because we don’t”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“From our bed”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“But Mount Fuji is simultaneously a spiritual phenomenon”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“We can be as broken by a failure to find our professional destiny as we are by our inability to identify an intimate companion.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“At fifty”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Fifty is plainly and soberly the age of melancholy. Until then”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“The problem with buildings is that they have a great influence over our self-conception. Very often”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“How to bear the terror of failure? With Shakespeare as our guide”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“More than anything”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Klein’s insight was to associate maturity with a rejection of all such divisive ‘split’ positions. To be a proper grown-up is to realise that there are no paragons or monsters”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“It is a characteristic temptation of the mind to declare things to be either very”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“We are generally left standing at parties”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“We are members of a strange and shameful melancholy minority: those whose most profound and intense love affairs are with people they have never spoken to.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Goodness is”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“There is really only one question you ever need to direct at someone to work out whether or not they are a good person”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“The melancholy mind appreciates that it isn’t the best”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“In post-coital exhaustion”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Conversely”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“That’s why”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Beauty has served to highlight the ugliness that came before. We notice”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“The melancholy mind often suspects that everything may be a bit meaningless. Through astronomy”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“Planetariums may seem to be trying to show us the stars in order to equip us with the knowledge we’d require to become astronauts or physicists one day. In truth”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein speculated that this was no coincidence: if we remembered the womb, then our sorrow for what we had been forced to give up and our dissatisfaction with our present circumstances might reach such a pitch, it would be too intense to bear. We have to forget what we once had as a price for having the courage to continue.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“We are kept alive by a brute biological appetite reliant on ignorance. But if we imagine being given the option of magically returning to being five again, knowing what we know now, we would most likely say a firm no. We aren’t actively looking forward to death – we haven’t got plans to end things prematurely – but we couldn’t really bear to have our entire life again. Too many of our years have been spent in pain of one kind or another. There have been a few moments of fun and achievement, but, essentially, the score sheet has been too mixed to warrant another whole go. It’s a melancholy realisation.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“At the root of the melancholic cast of mind there is likely to be a poignant psychological backstory in childhood: a lack of early love. No one who has been firmly and decisively wanted by those who put them on the Earth will ever doubt their essential right to be here. They will be permanently validated by the enthusiasm of their parents.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“The world is hardly short of people. Quite why it needs yet another example, and why that example should be someone like us (with all our flaws, compulsions and mediocrities), is one of the conundrums that especially haunt those of us beset by melancholy. For these mournful souls, the first-order questions are never far away. Why are we here? What have we contributed? Are we worthy enough? Wouldn’t it be better for us not to have been born?”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods

“we should be self-compassionate enough to keep setting ourselves one slightly irrelevant but well-camouflaged challenge after another – and do our very best to pretend that these matter inordinately and that there should be no sizeable gaps between them. Our work exists to protect us from a brutal sense of despair and angst. We should ensure that we never stop having tasks to do – and never make that most reckless of moves, taking a long holiday, or – god forbid – embark on a truly foolhardy scheme, retiring.”
― The School of Life, Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods