Heartbreak

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Ann, in Man and Superman, act 4.

Heartbreak

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Ellie, in Heartbreak House, act 2.

Sorrow

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), French poet. Le Bateau Ivre, in Collected Poems (ed. by Oliver Bernard, 1962).

Melancholy

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81), Swiss philosopher, poet. Journal Intime (1882; tr. by Mrs. Humphry Ward, 1892), entry for 16 Nov. 1864.

Melancholy

Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life.

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), French sociologist. Suicide, bk. 3, ch. 3, sct. 1 (1897; tr. 1951).