What is melancholy?

Famous quotes containing the word melancholy:

“Pretty friendship ‘tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.””
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)

“I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, . . .”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

“A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.”
—William James (1842–1910)