A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Medical tag
Melancholia Depression
Melancholy, despondency, depressive states, acedia, 'low spirits'.
Works
A Mathematician's Apology is a short book of twenty-nine numbered sections in which the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, at sixty-two and conscious that his creative powers had faded, sets out to justify a life spent on pure mathematics. Cambridge University Press published it in 1940.
A Theologico-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in Latin in Amsterdam in 1670, under a false Hamburg imprint, by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Its title page announces its purpose: to show that freedom to philosophize can be granted without harm to piety or the peace of the commonwealth, and cannot be withheld without destroying both.
Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law. Dostoevsky makes the crime happen early, so the central drama becomes not detection alone but the decomposition of Raskolnikov's theory inside his body, mind, and relationships.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
Tuke describes the York Retreat, a Quaker institution founded after scandals in local madhouse care, as an alternative to fear, neglect, and routine coercion. The book gives the Retreat a history, an architecture, a daily rhythm, and a theory of treatment.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Gray's Elegy is a meditation spoken at dusk in a village churchyard. In the opening stanzas the curfew bell rings, the cattle wind home, the ploughman plods away, and the speaker is left alone with the darkening fields, an owl complaining from the ivied tower, and the grassy mounds where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Essays: First Series gathers twelve essays that Emerson worked up from his journals and from the lecture courses he gave in Boston in the late 1830s. Each pursues one idea through a rush of aphorisms, examples and images rather than a step-by-step argument, and together they set out his conviction that the same universal mind or soul speaks in every person and in nature.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else.
Heidi, in Elisabeth P. Stork’s public-domain English translation, tells of a small orphan brought to live with her reclusive Alm-Uncle high in the Swiss Alps, then carried away to Frankfurt’s closed rooms before homesickness and providence return her to mountain air, goats, and fir trees. Johanna Spyri’s novel joins outdoor joy to serious care for the sick, the lonely, and the hard-hearted.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mr. Popper's Penguins is a comic novel in twenty short chapters about a house painter in the small town of Stillwater who dreams of the polar regions. Mr. Popper is a gentle, rather untidy man with a patient wife and two children, Bill and Janie.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
Much Ado About Nothing is set in Messina, Sicily, where the governor Leonato welcomes Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, and his officers home from a victorious war. With the Prince come the young Florentine lord Claudio and the witty Paduan soldier Benedick, and also the Prince's sullen half-brother Don John, lately reconciled after a rebellion.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country.
Paradise Lost is John Milton's epic in twelve books of blank verse on the fall of man, written, as the opening invocation says, to assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men. It begins in the middle of things.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
Pragmatism collects eight popular lectures that William James gave at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December 1906 and at Columbia University in January 1907. Published that year and dedicated to the memory of John Stuart Mill, the book presents pragmatism as both a method for settling disputes and a theory of what truth is.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Spurgeon's Selected Sermons show Victorian evangelical preaching at industrial scale. Week by week, his sermons moved from pulpit to print, reaching readers far beyond the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises gathers the Luther who speaks from pulpit, classroom, controversy, and pastoral desk. The center is not one genre but a reformatory voice: the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgence abuse, The Freedom of a Christian, sermons on faith and good works, catechetical teaching, and occasional writings shaped by conflict.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
This paired entry sets Jonathan Edwards's most famous terror sermon beside his narrative of revival in Northampton and neighboring towns. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often remembered for its imagery of danger, wrath, and suspended judgment, but its structure is theological before it is theatrical.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
The Collar is a 36-line lyric from George Herbert's The Temple, the book of religious poems published in 1633, a few months after his death. Its speaker, a man bound to God's service and often read as a priest like Herbert himself, rises in revolt against that service.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
The House at Pooh Corner (1928) is the second and last book of A. A. Milne's stories about Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Forest. It opens with a short verse dedication to Milne's wife and a mock-introduction called a Contradiction, in which the narrator explains that Christopher Robin and his friends, already introduced in the first book, are now going to say good-bye.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Phantom Tollbooth is a comic fantasy about Milo, a boy so bored that nothing seems worth doing, learning, or even noticing. One afternoon he finds a large package in his room containing a toy tollbooth, a map of unfamiliar lands, coins and a rule book.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas in which a grieving student, alone at midnight in December, is visited by a talking bird that can say only one word. It appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, ahead of its printing in The American Review, and made Poe famous almost overnight.
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Waning of the Middle Ages is a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Burgundian Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Huizinga, a Dutch professor of history, published it in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, literally the autumn-tide of the Middle Ages.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twelfth Night begins with shipwreck, loss, and disguise. Viola believes her brother Sebastian drowned, enters Illyria as Cesario, and serves Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Throughout
Querry describes his loss of desire, pleasure and belief, a condition he likens to the leper's loss of sensation.
- A Mathematician's Apology, Section 29
Hardy's final self-assessment, including what he tells himself when depressed and his sense of steady deterioration since his forties.
- A Theologico-Political Treatise, Chapter II, Of Prophets
Revelation varying with each prophet's imagination and temperament, cheerful or melancholy.
- A Theologico-Political Treatise, Chapter I, Of Prophecy
Discussion of the phrase "spirit of the Lord" in Hebrew usage, including the melancholy of Saul, relieved by a musician, which Spinoza reads as a natural deep melancholy rather than something supernatural.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 7
Hume's despair, dread of error, sense of monstrous isolation and 'heated' brain, followed by recovery through dining, backgammon and conversation; he names his mood a splenetic humour.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Nosology chapters
The divisions of mania, melancholia, dementia, and idiotism show early nineteenth-century diagnostic language before modern mood and psychotic categories.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section I
Nature warns that excessive abstract study will be punished by pensive melancholy, uncertainty and cold reception, and recommends a mixed life of thought, action and society.
- As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1 and Act 2, Scene 5
Jaques weeps over a wounded stag and asks Amiens for more song to feed his melancholy.
- As You Like It, Act 4, Scene 1
Jaques's catalogue of the kinds of melancholy and Rosalind's reply.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Bartleby, middle and end
Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Benito Cereno, closing pages
Don Benito withdraws to a monastery and dies within months, unable to recover from his ordeal.
- Carmilla, Chapter VII, Descending
Laura describes weeks of lassitude, languor, melancholy and pallor, and a gentle, not unwelcome sense of slowly sinking toward death.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. VII–VIII
The super-ego, unconscious guilt, and the 'need for punishment'; melancholia as the clinical picture of a harsh super-ego; the possibility of diagnosing 'communal neuroses'.
- Complete Poems, 'Résumé' (Enough Rope)
A catalogue of methods of suicide and their disadvantages, ending in reluctant survival.
- Complete Poems, 'Symptom Recital' (Sunset Gun or Death and Taxes)
A list of complaints of mood, sleep and temper presented as symptoms, revealed as signs of falling in love.
- Confessions, Book IV.4–9
Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, hellebore
Black and white hellebore are purgative drugs associated in ancient medicine with melancholia and madness.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, opening
Willy returns home unable to drive, describing how his mind drifted and he nearly went off the road.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Sufism (the crisis at Baghdad)
Loss of speech, appetite and the ability to swallow; the physicians' verdict that the cause lies in the heart and in sadness.
- Description of the Retreat, Case statements
The case material records mania, melancholy, relapse, recovery, and chronic illness in early asylum language.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 1
Cleanthes says the sceptic's 'philosophical melancholy' dissipates on contact with external objects and passions.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (stone, ulcer, colic, frenzy, melancholy, madness, atrophy, marasmus, pestilence) and catalogues disorders of the mind; a hospital full of diseases as a specimen of the world's ills.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Gratuitous pains of gout, gravel, migraine, toothache and rheumatism, and spleen, melancholy and superstition as pains of the mind.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.
- East of Eden, Parts Two–Three
Adam's prolonged numbness and neglect of his sons until Samuel confronts him.
- Effi Briest, Final chapters (c. Ch. 33–36)
Effi's decline after Annie's visit, Rummschüttel's letter to her parents, and her death at Hohen-Cremmen.
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Stanzas 26-27
The hoary-headed swain describes the youth stretching listlessly by the brook at noon and roving the wood drooping, wan and crazed with care or hopeless love.
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, The Epitaph, lines 117-120
The epitaph names Melancholy as the defining mark of the young man's character, alongside his learning and humble birth.
- Essays, Essay I, Of Truth
Illusions and flattering hopes as supports of morale; without them minds would be 'full of melancholy and indisposition'.
- Essays, Essay XXVII, Of Friendship
Friendship as the remedy for 'stoppings and suffocations' of the heart; contemporary remedies for liver, spleen, lungs and brain; those without friends as cannibals of their own hearts; a physician unacquainted with the patient's body may cure the disease and kill the patient.
- Essays, Essay XXXI, Of Suspicion
Suspicions as defects 'not in the heart, but in the brain' that dispose wise men to irresolution and melancholy, remedied by learning more.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On the Suffering of the World' and 'On the Vanity of Existence' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Pain as positive and pleasure as negative; boredom; life as a debt repaid at death.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Ethical Reflections' (stored text)
Two moods toward misery: suffering felt in oneself, which intensifies the will until resignation, and suffering seen in others, which produces sympathy.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Of Superstition and Enthusiasm
Superstition traced to weakness, fear and melancholy; enthusiasm to presumption, luxuriant health and strong spirits.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion
An excessive sensibility to fortune, with its piercing griefs, and the cultivation of taste as its remedy.
- Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays), II. Self-Reliance, section on travel
The traveller arrives in Naples and finds the sad self he fled; restlessness is called a symptom of a deeper unsoundness.
- Ethics, Part IV, Props. XLI–XLIV and Notes
Pleasure and pain evaluated by their bodily effects; mirth always good, melancholy always bad, localized stimulation and love capable of excess; fixed ideas as madness.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the next morning
Mildred, hungry and cheerful, remembers nothing and denies she would have taken so many pills.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part Two, the evening with Mildred's friends
Mrs. Bowles describes having her children by Caesarean section and leaving them to the parlor walls; Mrs. Phelps weeps at Dover Beach.
- Faust, Part One, Scene I, Night
Faust despairs of his learning and lifts a cup of poison to drink at dawn before the Easter bells stop him.
- Fear and Trembling, Preamble from the Heart
The lad who renounces the princess and transforms lost love into eternal remembrance, a model of resignation set beside grief.
- Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. I (1818) / Ch. 9 (1831)
After Justine's execution, Victor's despondency, sleeplessness and thoughts of drowning himself in the lake.
- Galen: Selected Works, Commentaries on Hippocratic aphorisms
Galen’s discussions of melancholia, mania and phrenitis transmit Hippocratic categories through humoral explanation.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§132-141
The repeated inner voice urging him to sell Christ, his bodily efforts to resist it, and the moment he believes he consented.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§142-228
The long period of despair under the example of Esau, with physical sensations he attributes to guilt.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (examples of acting from duty)
The person who preserves life without loving it after hopeless sorrow, and the philanthropist whose own grief has extinguished sympathy.
- Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2
Hamlet's first soliloquy wishes his flesh would melt and regrets the divine law against self-slaughter.
- Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
Hamlet describes the loss of mirth and pleasure in exercise, and Polonius diagnoses love-madness.
- Hard Times, Book the Second, Chapter XII
Louisa's confession to her father of an empty inner life and her collapse at his feet.
- Heidi, Frankfurt chapters
Heidi declines emotionally and bodily with longing.
- Heroides, Letter V (Oenone to Paris)
Oenone recalls that Apollo taught her healing and every useful herb, yet she cannot cure her own love.
- Heroides, Letter XV (Sappho to Phaon)
Sappho describes weeping, sleeplessness and dreams of Phaon, and is told of the leap from the Leucadian rock as a cure for love.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 14–17
The brain is presented as the organ through which people think, perceive, rejoice, grieve, become mad and suffer terrors.
- Hippocratic Writings, Aphorisms, Book 6
Aphoristic remarks classify melancholic and phrenitic states within bodily illness and prognosis.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Second, Ch. VII
After the college master's rebuff Jude drinks in a Christminster tavern and recites the Creed in Latin to the company.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. II–IV
The premature birth and death of Sue's baby, her conviction of divine judgment, and her penitential return to Phillotson.
- Kokoro, Part One
Sensei's monthly visits to K's grave and his gloomy reflections on human nature.
- Kokoro, Part Three (end)
Sensei's account of his long guilt and his resolve to die.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Manic-depressive lectures
Recurring excitement and depression are grouped by course rather than isolated symptoms.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters on time, waiting and longing (winter 1943–1944)
Reflections on the experience of time in prison, homesickness, and the danger of letting longing become despair.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to a mind diseased; 'Throw physic to the dogs'.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
Apathy as emotional protection; hunger, edema and cold; prisoners' fantasies about food; the provisional existence with no foreseeable end.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
A fellow prisoner's dream foretells liberation on 30 March; when the date approaches without rescue he falls ill and dies, which Frankl links to the loss of hope.
- Meditations, Book 5.1
Argument with himself about getting out of bed in the morning.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. IX (Kentucky, autumn 1861)
Cameron's memorandum, newspaper reports that Sherman was insane, his relief from command and his sense that his position was unbearable.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XI
Sherman describes Shiloh as having given him new life after being cast down by the 'crazy' label, and counsels a demoralised Grant.
- Mental Maladies, Lypemania and monomania
The diagnostic chapters track partial delusions, fixed ideas, fear, sorrow, and suicidal danger under now-historical labels.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Clinical books
The syndrome descriptions of melancholia, exaltation, monomania, and dementia show German psychiatry before Kraepelin.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 1
Ishmael's hypos and his going to sea as a substitute for pistol and ball.
- Mr. Popper's Penguins, Middle chapters (Captain Cook's illness and Greta's arrival)
Captain Cook declines, the aquarium curator suggests loneliness, and the penguins recover once Greta comes.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Midday, Septimus's history
Evans's death in Italy, Septimus's pride at feeling nothing, the panic in Milan that drives him to propose to Lucrezia, and the later discovery that he cannot feel or taste.
- Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 3
Don John rejects Conrade's counsel of patient sufferance, which he calls a moral medicine, and insists on showing his sadness.
- My Ántonia, Book I (first winter)
The Shimerdas' hunger and hardship in the dugout; Mr Shimerda's homesickness and withdrawal.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 25, hellebore traditions
Hellebore appears in the ancient therapeutic world of purging and treatment of mental disturbance.
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay III
The ascetic ideal is interpreted as a technique for giving suffering a meaning.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Book I, Ch. XIV
Survey and criticism of medicinal claims for the loadstone: purging humours, causing melancholy, curing headaches, extracting arrowheads, and its use in wound plasters.
- Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 1
Orlando's sudden falls from joy into melancholy on the frozen Thames, and the narrator's reflection on happiness, melancholy and madness.
- Paradise Lost, Book IV
Satan's soliloquy on Mount Niphates: the self-made hell of envy and despair.
- Paradise Lost, Book XI
Michael's vision of the lazar-house lists the diseases, madness and melancholy that will afflict Adam's descendants.
- Pensees, Fragment 131, Section II
Weariness: at rest without occupation, man feels his nothingness and from his heart rise gloom, sadness, fretfulness and despair.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 11
Captain Benwick's mourning for his dead fiancée; Anne advises him to read more prose and less poetry.
- Poems, Inscape and praise
Poems gives this tag concrete force through hopkins is important for melancholia, scruple, exhaustion, vocation stress, and the language of inward suffering before modern diagnostic categories
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, First Series, Nature XXXI
A winter afternoon light gives a heavenly hurt with no scar, called the seal of despair and an imperial affliction.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, Third Series, Time and Eternity XXX
Mourners tread and a service beats like a drum inside the speaker's brain until her mind goes numb and she is left wrecked and solitary in a silence where all the heavens toll like a bell; the 1896 printing ends there, without the manuscript's final stanza.
- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture VIII
The healthy and the morbid responses to an offered world whose salvation is possible but not guaranteed.
- Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1
Richard's opening soliloquy describes his deformity and premature birth; Hastings reports that the king is sickly and his physicians fear for him.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1
Montague describes Romeo's sleeplessness, tears and darkened room, calling it a black and portentous humour; Benvolio prescribes looking at other beauties.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons addressed to the downcast
Spurgeon repeatedly offers consolation to hearers experiencing despair, guilt, grief, and spiritual darkness.
- Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Sermons and treatises on temptation and conscience
Luther addresses terrified conscience as a condition requiring gospel consolation rather than moral bookkeeping.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 7–9
Marianne's grief after Willoughby's letter: refusal of food, sleeplessness and hysterical weeping, while Elinor attends her.
- Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermons on wounds and languishing
Bernard's love-sickness imagery shows medieval overlaps between emotion, body, and religious cure.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Books VII–VIII (winter 1917–18)
Daud's death from cold; Farraj wounded and killed by Lawrence to spare him capture and torture; Lawrence's growing exhaustion and despair before asking to be relieved.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Samsara'
Siddhartha's gradual decline into gambling, wine and satiety, ending in self-disgust.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Faithful Narrative, descriptions of awakenings
Reports of distress, tears, joy, and communal spread show revival emotion as an interpretive challenge.
- Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 38 (not in stored text)
Remedies of sorrow: pleasure, weeping, the sympathy of friends, contemplation of truth, and sleep and baths, which restore the body's natural movement.
- Tales (Selection), The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline's illness and entombment
Madeline's settled apathy, gradual wasting and cataleptic affections baffle her physicians; her body, with a faint blush and lingering smile, is placed in a vault for a fortnight.
- Testament of Youth, Part III
Postwar Oxford: estrangement, numbness, nightmares and a period of distressing perceptions about her own face, followed by gradual recovery.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus Junior to the Reader
Burton's confession of melancholy, his account of writing as occupation against it, and the satirical argument that the whole world is mad.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4–5; Memb. 3, Subs. 1
Distinctions between madness, frenzy, melancholy as disposition and melancholy as habit, and the definition of melancholy as dotage without fever, with fear and sadness.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5–7
Bad air, immoderate exercise, solitariness and idleness, and disordered sleeping and waking as causes of melancholy.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 15
Overmuch study as a cause of madness, with the digression on the misery of scholars and why the Muses are melancholy.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 3, Sect. 2
Heroical or love-melancholy treated as a disease, with symptoms (wasting, sleeplessness, sighing) and cures from diet and labour to marriage.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 3, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 2–6
Religious despair: definitions, causes in the devil, melancholy and terrifying preaching, symptoms of fear and anxiety, prognosis toward violent death, and cure by physic and good counsel.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 1.28–1.47
Arjuna's physical and emotional collapse: trembling, dry mouth, burning skin, a reeling mind and refusal to fight.
- The Bible, 1 Samuel 16:14–23; 18:10–11
Saul's evil spirit, David's harp, and Saul's later violent episodes.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §3
The wisdom of Silenus, that it is best not to be born and next best to die soon, as the pessimistic ground of Greek art.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §7
The lethargic gulf of oblivion after Dionysian ecstasy; return to everyday reality brings nausea and an ascetic, will-paralysing mood; art as a healing enchantress.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 1, Theses III-IV
The temperaments and their variation by age and sex; the four humours, their normal and abnormal forms, and their generation in the liver.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 2, Thesis 2, paras. 336-345
Effects of sleep, wakefulness and insomnia; the passions as movements of the breath, with fear, anger, gloom and shame; the parents' imagination and the offspring.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Knight's Tale, Arcite in exile
Arcite wastes with the lover's malady, engendered of melancholic humours.
- The Collar, Lines 3 and 10-12
The speaker's sighing and pining, and the sighs and tears that have dried his wine and drowned his corn.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1
The Abbess traces the husband's supposed madness to broken sleep, disturbed meals and barred recreation leading to fever and melancholy, and offers syrups, drugs and prayers.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 1, opening
Boethius lies grieving in prison until Philosophy appears and diagnoses his condition.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters (before 'Number 34 and Number 27')
Dantès, despairing in solitary confinement, resolves to die by refusing food.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 6
The Caius syllogism: he cannot accept that the logic of mortality applies to himself.
- The Divine Comedy, Inferno
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Suffering and anxiety chapters
Descriptions of grief, fear, anxiety, and bodily signs are useful for histories of affect and psychiatry.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto IX, stanzas 28-54
Trevisan's flight, the cave of Despair, the argument for suicide, and Una's rescue of the knight as he raises the knife.
- The Gay Science, Eternal recurrence aphorism
The thought experiment tests whether suffering and joy can be affirmed together.
- The House at Pooh Corner, Chapters I and VI
Eeyore expects to be forgotten when his house disappears and when he floats in the river, and the friends answer his gloom with help.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1729 (the Oxford years)
The first great attack of morbid melancholy, Johnson's long walks to fight it, and the Latin case history he gave Dr. Swinfen.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1776 (Aetat. 67)
Johnson's advice on constitutional melancholy: divert rather than combat distressing thoughts, keep a lamp lit, read when wakeful.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 7: The Pyre of Denethor
Denethor, despairing after looking into the palantír, burns himself and nearly burns his living son.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 13
The Master tells Ivan of his novel's persecution, his fear, the burning of the manuscript and his flight to the clinic.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 1
Antonio's unexplained sadness, his friends' guesses at its cause, and Gratiano's humoral advice to play the fool.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 2
Portia says her little body is weary of the world; Nerissa answers that surfeit sickens as much as starving.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1
Antonio bares his breast as a tainted wether; Portia asks for a surgeon to stop his wounds and rules on flesh without blood.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day'
A meditation on the longest night in which the speaker describes himself as the quintessence of nothingness after a loved one's death.
- The Metaphysical Poets, George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'
Herbert recounts how sickness and setbacks wasted his youth, and his complaint against God.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Misanthrope, subtitle and Act 1, Scene 1
Alceste's black humour and contempt for society, framed by the subtitle 'The Atrabilious Lover' (atrabile = black bile).
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, opening chapters
Quinn's bereavement, pseudonymous writing life and willingness to answer a call meant for another person set up identity as a fragile compensatory structure.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 96–111)
Movements of blood and spirits, and changes of pulse, heat and digestion, in love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness; why love is good for health and sadness weakens the appetite.
- The Phantom Tollbooth, Chapter 1
Milo's opening listlessness: everything seems a waste of time and nothing interests him.
- The Phantom Tollbooth, Chapter 2
The Doldrums, where the Lethargians have outlawed thinking and laughing; Milo leaves only when he starts to think.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Selected poems on suicide and heartbreak
Several short lyrics use comic form to stage suicidal thought, romantic despair and the social performance of toughness.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Rome marriage chapters
Isabel's life with Osmond is marked by constriction, watchfulness and psychological coercion rather than overt physical violence.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 23, Dr Kelman
The king tells of his despondency, sleeplessness, dreams and suspicion; the doctor fills the glass from a phial and takes out a lancet before Lina seizes him.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self
Mutations of the self: insane delusions, alternating personalities, Janet's patient Lucie, the boy Louis V., the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, and mediumship.
- The Raven, Stanzas 15-18
Escalating questions about healing and reunion end in the speaker's own declaration that his soul will never rise from the shadow.
- The Republic and The Laws, Republic, Book II, closing fragments
Reason as the driver of an elephant or charioteer of the passions, with a fragment naming a kind of anxiety prone to mourning and melancholy.
- The River War, Chapter VII: The Recovery of the Dongola Province
Cholera creeps up the Nile from Cairo; case-fatality near 80 per cent among the first thousand cases; detailed casualty figures; profound depression across the army.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 11-12
Dimmesdale's vigils, self-punishment and wasting health show guilt translated into bodily and mental suffering.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letters VIII-IX
The law of Undulation: humans as creatures of body and spirit pass through natural peaks and troughs of feeling, which tempters try to exploit during dry periods.
- The Secret Garden, Archibald Craven's return
The father's grief and withdrawal are treated through dream, memory and reunion with the recovered child.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, A
Despair as a sickness one cannot die of: the torment of wishing to die and being unable to, of the self wanting to be rid of itself.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (forms of the synthesis)
Despair of infinitude lost in fantasy and despair of possibility, set against fatalistic and philistine despair of necessity; descriptions often compared to grandiosity and to depressive hopelessness.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (despair of weakness and of defiance)
Despair over the earthly and over oneself, inclosing reserve that hides despair from others, the risk of suicide in the inclosed person, and demonic defiance.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Broken Heart
Crayon argues that women can die of disappointed love and tells of a betrothed girl who wastes away in melancholy after her lover's execution.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Pride of the Village
A village girl deserted by an officer declines through the spring and dies, the parish mourning at her funeral.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XV, Hiawatha's Lamentation
Seven weeks of mourning for Chibiabos, ended by the Medas' herbal drink, chants and medicine-dance; Hiawatha then teaches simples, antidotes and the art of healing.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter XXIX
Brynhild lies abed as one dead, will not answer Gunnar, and speaks only of her wrongs before she demands Sigurd's death.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter IV, closing pages
The weariness, disappointment and dissatisfaction with life of women whose faculties have no outlet: the feeling of a wasted life.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Induction, Scene 2
The Lord's servants persuade Sly that he has been mad for fifteen years, mention his physicians' orders, and announce a comedy as a remedy for melancholy.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XXII
Huntingdon tells Helen how Lowborough forswore drink but kept a private bottle of laudanum, then relapsed into spirits at the club.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter III
The harsh rector at Slagelse and Helsingør and the misery that brings him near to sinking.
- The Vampyre, Final marriage plot
Aubrey's failed warning and death frame secrecy and social disbelief as fatal for his sister.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.
- The Waning of the Middle Ages, Chapter II, Pessimism and the Ideal of the Sublime Life
The melancholy complaints of poets and chroniclers about the miseries of the world.
- The Warden, Harding under attack
Harding's conscience and public shame disturb his peace, appetite and sense of vocation.
- The Waves, Rhoda's soliloquies
Rhoda repeatedly experiences terror, unreality and separation from ordinary social identity.
- The World as Will and Representation, Fourth Book, §§56–59
Life as constant striving, pain and boredom; the negativity of happiness; the sum of suffering in human life.
- This Side of Paradise, Book Two, Ch. 2
Amory's three-week binge after Rosalind leaves him, ended by the coming of Prohibition.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourses III–IV: Backworldsmen; The Despisers of the Body
Otherworldly belief traced to the weariness of the sick body; the ego as the instrument of a bodily Self; the body as 'a plurality with one sense'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, Discourse LVII: The Convalescent
Zarathustra falls 'as one dead', lies seven days without eating, is fed and watched by his animals, and recovers to describe his 'great disgust at man'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche (stored text, before the Prologue)
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes the Rapallo winter of influenza and her brother's effort in spring 1883 to stop taking chloral hydrate.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV
Separation intensifies Troilus's despair, appetite loss and fixation on Criseyde's return.
- Twelfth Night, Shipwreck and disguise
Twelfth Night gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes melancholy, love-sickness, feigned madness, confinement, and the social power to declare someone disordered
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Nocturnal poems
Night settings intensify solitude, sleepless reflection and the speaker's need to address an absent beloved.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, A Song of Despair
The closing poem gathers erotic loss into lament, grief and depressive imagery.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter IV, The Snare of Preparation
Medical school, the spinal difficulty, Weir Mitchell's hospital, six months in bed, and years of nervous depression.
- Uncle Vanya, Act III
Vanya's despair at the family council ends in two shots fired at the professor.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (higher and lower pleasures)
The competent-judge test; the claim that pains, like pleasures, can only be ranked by the experienced; the 'tender plant' of the nobler feelings that dies for want of sustenance.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (whether happiness is attainable)
Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.
- Villette, Ch. XV
The long vacation: Lucy alone with a disabled pupil, then wholly alone, sleepless and despairing, until she confesses at a church and collapses.
- Walden, Economy
The diagnosis of quiet desperation among Concord's laboring men, followed by the inventory of necessaries and Thoreau's food accounts.
- Walden, Solitude
Thoreau argues that nature's society cures melancholy and that a gentle rain is good company for a man alone.
- Washington Square, Europe journey
Sloper attempts to cure Catherine's attachment through distance and pressure, treating emotion as a correctable error.
- Washington Square, Final refusal
Catherine's refusal of Morris shows a life after romantic injury that is neither cure nor collapse.
- White Nights, First night
The dreamer's solitary walks and attachment to buildings show urban loneliness converted into imaginative companionship.
- White Nights, Fourth night and morning
The dreamer's sudden hope and loss form a compact study of attachment, disappointment and depressive return.
Quotes
“I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster”
“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium”
“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends”
“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man”
“it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects”
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
Frequently cited
“I would prefer not to”
“A strange melancholy was stealing over me”
“You might as well live.”
“At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death”
“It is certain my disorder was in a great measure hypochondriacal”
Frequently cited
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart”
“Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
“The mischief is in the heart, and has communicated itself to the whole organism; there is no hope unless the cause of his grievous sadness be arrested.”
“External objects press in upon him; passions solicit him; his philosophical melancholy dissipates”
“Remorse, shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection, despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel inroads from these tormentors”
“We are terrified, not bribed to the continuance of our existence”
“He says the best way out is always through.”
“Fair Science frown'd not on his humble Birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.”
“Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves”
“you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend”
“As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated”
“It is in their person that we become aware of human misery; we are filled with sympathy; and the result of this mood is general benevolence, philanthropy”
“Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of Superstition.”
“Travelling is a fool’s paradise.”
“PROP. XLII. Mirth cannot be excessive, but is always good; contrariwise, Melancholy is always bad”
“PROP. LIV. Repentance is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason; but he who repents of an action is doubly wretched or infirm”
Frequently cited
“I’ve studied now Philosophy And Jurisprudence, Medicine,— And even, alas! Theology,— From end to end, with labor keen; And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before”
Frequently cited
“My peace is gone, My heart is sore: I never shall find it, Ah, nevermore!”
Frequently cited
“I am malicious because I am miserable”
Frequently cited
“Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed”
“if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life; if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it- not from inclination or fear, but from duty- then his maxim has a moral worth”
“Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others”
“A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life”
Frequently cited
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew”
“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory”
Frequently cited
“To be, or not to be, that is the question”
“How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death?”
Frequently cited
“Alas, wretched me, that love may not be healed by herbs!”
“Dejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY, apparent also in divers manners; as in haunting of solitudes, and graves; in superstitious behaviour; and in fearing some one, some another particular thing”
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?”
Frequently cited
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being.”
“the report that I was "crazy, insane, and mad," that "I had demanded two hundred thousand men for the defense of Kentucky”
“Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of "crazy;" but that single battle had given me new life, and now I was in high feather”
“whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet”
“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”
“The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head--that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad”
“By this comes to light for the inexperienced eye one of those things which put fetters in the dark, as it were, on the action of the mind, and wear out in secret the powers of the soul”
“For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy”
Frequently cited
“Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell”
“Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study”
“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought”
Frequently cited
“There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes.”
“Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;”
Frequently cited
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens”
“All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy”
“I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business”
“Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality”
“The common sort define it to be a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion”
“puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation, as an especial cause of madness”
“Musica est mentis medicina moestae, a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul”
“Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men, and must therefore be speedily helped, and sleep by all means procured”
“observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle”
“And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him”
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived”
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones”
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts”
Frequently cited
“What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to _be_, to be _nothing._ The second best for you, however, is soon to die”
“Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion--it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches”
“Here, in this extremest danger of the will, _art_ approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress”
Frequently cited
“Therefore in safeguarding the emotions the health of the mind and body are at the same time maintained.”
Frequently cited
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost”
Frequently cited
“Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease, And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave? Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.”
“In that disease of grieved conscience, And well could cure the same; his name was Patience.”
Frequently cited
“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him”
Frequently cited
“In sooth I know not why I am so sad”
Frequently cited
“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!”
“The violence of the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks of disease appal the boldest”
Frequently cited
“Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation”
“I believe in broken hearts, and the possibility of dying of disappointed love!”
“Straightway from his brain departed All his moody melancholy;”
“Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy”
“That was the darkest, the most unhappy time in my life.”
“Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead”
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
“suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”
Frequently cited
“Thus its life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui”
“All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is always really and essentially only _negative_, and never positive”
Frequently cited
“The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen”
Frequently cited
“If I had lived a normal life I might have become another Schopenhauer or Dostoieffski.”
“Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance”
“Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory, is want of mental cultivation”
“How I used to pray to Heaven for consolation and support!”
Frequently cited
“Medicine can give nobody good spirits. My art halts at the threshold of Hypochondria: she just looks in and sees a chamber of torture, but can neither say nor do much.”
Frequently cited
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”