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If I feel strongly about anything, I get overwhelmed with emotion.

The belief that a person can and should only feel grief over one sad event at a time is a truly disturbing estimate of our emotional capacity.

Sadness is weak; I don't believe in weakness.

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

Well, you can't be depressed and sad 24 hours a day.

I am not a depressive person at all.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this.

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.

In such a diversity it was impossible I should be disposed to melancholy.