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Melancholy Is Sadness That Has Taken On Lightness.
-Italo Calvino
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Melancholy Is Sadness That

Italo Calvino
...
Melancholy Is Sadness That Has Taken On Lightness.

Understanding the Quote: "melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness...."

This quote by Italo Calvino reflects deeply on the theme of sad. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Sad, Taken, Melancholy, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Italo Calvino interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino is celebrated for insightful thoughts on sad and taken. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 15771
Topic
Sad
Taken
Melancholy
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To Fly Is The Opposite Of Traveling: You Cross A Gap In Space, You Vanish Into The Void, You Accept Not Being In A Place For A Duration That Is Itself A Kind Of Void In Time; Then You Reappear, In A Place And In A Moment With No Relation To The Where And When In Which You Vanished.
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There Is Nothing For It But For All Of Us To Invent Our Own Ideal Libraries Of Classics. I Would Say That Such A Library Ought To Be Composed Half Of Books We Have Read And That Have Really Counted For Us, And Half Of Books We Propose To Read And Presume Will Come To Count—leaving A Section Of Empty Shelves For Surprises And Occasional Discoveries
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…we Can Not Love Or Think Except In Fragments Of Time Each Of Which Goes Along Its Own Trajectory And Immediately Disappears.
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Having Exhausted Every Possibility At The Moment When He Was Coming Full Circle, Antonino Realised That Photographing Photographs Was The Only Course That He Had Left - Or, Rather, The True Course He Had Obscurely Been Seeking All This Time. (last Line Of The Story The Adventure Of A Photographer )
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In An Age When Other Fantastically Speedy, Widespread Media Are Triumphing, And Running The Risk Of Flattening All Communication Onto A Single, Homogenous Surface, The Function Of Literature Is Communication Between Things That Are Different Simply Because They Are Different, Not Blunting But Even Sharpening The Differences Between Them, Following The True Bent Of Written Language.
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The More Enlightened Our Houses Are, The More Their Walls Ooze Ghosts.
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So Began Their Love, The Boy Happy And Amazed, She Happy And Not Surprised At All (nothing Happens By Chance To Girls). It Was The Love So Long Awaited By Cosimo And Which Had Now Inexplicably Arrived, And So Lovely That He Could Not Imagine How He Had Even Thought It Lovely Before. And The Thing Newest To Him Was That It Was So Simple, And The Boy At That Moment Thought It Must Be Like That Always.
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The Minute You Start Saying Something, 'ah, How Beautiful! We Must Photograph It!' You Are Already Close To View Of The Person Who Thinks That Everything That Is Not Photographed Is Lost, As If It Had Never Existed, And That Therefore, In Order Really To Live, You Must Photograph As Much As You Can, And To Photograph As Much As You Can You Must Either Live In The Most Photographable Way Possible, Or Else Consider Photographable Every Moment Of Your Life. The First Course Leads To Stupidity; The Second To Madness.
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...and Every Wednesday The Perfumed Young Lady Slips Me A Hundred-crown Note To Leave Her Alone With The Convict. And By Thursday The Hundred Crowns Are Already Gone In So Much Beer. And When The Visiting Hour Is Over, The Young Lady Comes Out With The Stink Of Jail In Her Elegant Clothes; And The Prisoner Goes Back To His Cell With The Lady's Perfume In His Jailbird's Suit. And I'm Left With The Smell Of Beer. Life Is Nothing But Trading Smells.
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The City, However, Does Not Tell Its Past, But Contains It Like The Lines Of A Hand, Written In The Corners Of The Streets, The Gratings Of The Windows, The Banisters Of The Steps, The Antennae Of The Lightning Rods, The Poles Of The Flags, Every Segment Marked In Turn With Scratches, Indentations, Scrolls.
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How Well I Would Write If I Were Not Here!
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There Is Still One Of Which You Never Speak.' Marco Polo Bowed His Head. 'venice,' The Khan Said. Marco Smiled. 'what Else Do You Believe I Have Been Talking To You About?' The Emperor Did Not Turn A Hair. 'and Yet I Have Never Heard You Mention That Name.' And Polo Said: 'every Time I Describe A City I Am Saying Something About Venice.
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Don't Ask Where The Rest Of This Book Is!" It Is A Shrill Cry That Comes From An Undefined Spot Among The Shelves. "all Books Continue In The Beyond.
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They Knew Each Other. He Knew Her And So Himself, For In Truth He Had Never Known Himself. And She Knew Him And So Herself, For Although She Had Always Known Herself She Had Never Been Able To Recognize It Until Now.
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When Politicians And Politically Minded People Pay Too Much Attention To Literature, It Is A Bad Sign - A Bad Sign Mostly For Literature. But It Is Also A Bad Sign When They Don't Want To Hear The Word Mentioned.
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What He Sought Was Always Something Lying Ahead, And Even If It Was A Matter Of The Past It Was A Past That Changed Gradually As He Advanced On His Journey, Because The Traveller's Past Changes According To The Route He Has Followed: Not The Immediate Past, That Is, To Which Each Day That Goes By Adds A Day, But The More Remote Past. Arriving At Each New City, The Traveller Finds Again A Past Of His That He Did Not Know He Had: The Foreignness Of What You No Longer Are Or No Longer Possess Lies In Wait For You In Foreign, Unpossessed Places.
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Concern
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For Those Who Pass It Without Entering, The City Is One Thing; It Is Another For Those Who Are Trapped By It And Never Leave. There Is The City Where You Arrive For The First Time; And There Is Another City Which You Leave Never To Return. Each Deserves A Different Name; Perhaps I Have Already Spoken Of Irene Under Other Names; Perhaps I Have Spoken Only Of Irene.
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Names
Different
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Travel
Mirrors
Negative
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If A Lover Is Wretched Who Invokes Kisses Of Which He Knows Not The Flavor, A Thousand Times More Wretched Is He Who Has Had A Taste Of The Flavor And Then Had It Denied Him.
Kissing
Flavor
Taste
The Things That The Novel Does Not Say Are Necessarily More Numerous Than Those It Does Say And Only A Special Halo Around What Is Written Can Give The Illusion That You Are Reading Also What Is Not Written.
Reading
Giving
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Today Each Of You Is The Object Of The Other’s Reading, One Reads In The Other The Unwritten Story.
Reading
Stories
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Two
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The Sea Where Living Creatures Were At One Time Immersed Is Now Enclosed Within Their Bodies.
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Body
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Nobody These Days Holds The Written Word In Such High Esteem As Police States Do.
Police
Irony
States
The Book I'm Looking For,' Says The Blurred Figure, Who Holds Out A Volume Similar To Yours, 'is The One That Gives The Sense Of The World After The End Of The World, The Sense That The World Is The End Of Everything That There Is In The World, That The Only Thing There Is In The World Is The End Of The World.
Book
Giving
World
You Know That The Best You Can Expect Is To Avoid The Worst.
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Knows
Your House, Being The Place In Which You Read, Can Tell Us The Position Books Occupy In Your Life, If They Are A Defense You Set Up To Keep The Outside World At A Distance, If They Area Dream Into Which You Sink As If Into A Drug, Or Bridges You Cast Toward The Outside, Toward The World That Interests You So Much That You Want To Multiply And Extend Its Dimensions Through Books.
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Distance
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Though I Leave The House As Little As Possible, I Have The Impression That Someone Is Disturbing My Papers. More Than Once I Have Discovered That Some Pages Were Missing From My Manuscripts. A Few Days Afterward I Would Find The Pages In Their Place Again. But Often I No Longer Recognize My Manuscripts, As If I Had Forgotten What I Had Written, Or As If Overnight I Were So Changed That No Longer Recognized Myself In The Self Of Yesterday.
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Self
House
You Take Delight Not In A City's Seven Or Seventy Wonders, But In The Answer It Gives To A Question Of Yours.
Cities
Giving
Delight
Fantasy Is Like Jam. . . . You Have To Spread It On A Solid Piece Of Bread. If Not, It Remains A Shapeless Thing . . . Out Of Which You Can’t Make Anything.
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A Classic Is A Book Which With Each Rereading Offers As Much Of A Sense Of Discovery As The First Reading.
Book
Reading
Discovery
Traveling, You Realize That Differences Are Lost: Each City Takes To Resembling All Cities, Places Exchange Their Form, Order, Distances, A Shapeless Dust Cloud Invades The Continents.
Travel
Distance
Clouds
The More One Was Lost In Unfamiliar Quarters Of Distant Cities, The More One Understood The Other Cities He Had Crossed To Arrive There.
Cities
Lost
Quarters
For The Man Who Thought He Was Man There Is No Salvation.
Men
He Man
Salvation
It Is Not The Voice That Commands The Story: It Is The Ear.
Communication
Voice
Stories
Memory Really Matters...only If It Binds Together The Imprint Of The Past And The Project Of The Future, If It Enables Us To Act Without Forgetting What We Wanted To Do, To Become Without Ceasing To Be, And To Be Without Ceasing To Become.
Memories
Past
Together
In Love, As In Gluttony, Pleasure Is A Matter Of The Utmost Precision.
Love
Matter
Pleasure
Myth Is The Hidden Part Of Every Story, The Buried Part, The Region That Is Still Unexplored Because There Are As Yet No Words To Enable Us To Get There. Myth Is Nourished By Silence As Well As By Words.
Silence
Stories
Buried
Work Stops At Sunset. Darkness Falls Over The Building Site. The Sky Is Filled With Stars. "there Is The Blueprint," They Say.
Stars
Fall
Sunset
Without Translation, I Would Be Limited To The Borders Of My Own Country. The Translator Is My Most Important Ally. He Introduces Me To The World.
Country
Important
World
Memory Is Redundant: It Repeats Signs So That The City Can Begin To Exist.
Memories
Cities
Redundant
Futures Not Achieved Are Only Branches Of The Past: Dead Branches.
Past
Branches
Who Are We, Who Is Each One Of Us, If Not A Combination Of Experiences, Information, Books We Have Read, Things Imagined? Each Life Is An Encyclopedia, A Library, An Inventory Of Objects, A Series Of Styles, And Everything Can Be Constantly Shuffled And Reordered In Every Way Conceivable.
Book
Style
Library
Writing Always Means Hiding Something In Such A Way That It Then Is Discovered.
Truth
Writing
Mean
Renouncing Things Is Less Difficult Than People Believe: It's All A Matter Of Getting Started. Once You've Succeeded In Dispensing With Something You Thought Essential, You Realize You Can Also Do Without Something Else, Then Without Many Other Things.
Believe
People
Essentials
Each New Clarice, Compact As A Living Body With Its Smells And Its Breath, Shows Off, Like A Gem, What Remains Of The Ancient Clarices, Fragmentary And Dead.
Smell
Cairo
Body
Why Come To Trude? I Asked Myself. And I Already Wanted To Leave. You Cand Resume Your Flight Whereever You Like," They Say To Me, "but You Will Arive At Another Trude, Absolutely The Same, Detail By Detail. The World Is Covered By A Sole Trude Which Does Not Begin And Does Not End. Only The Names Of The Airport Changes.
Airports
Names
Details
Each Sort Of Cheese Reveals A Pasture Of A Different Green, Under A Different Sky.
Food
Sky
Cooking
A Person's Life Consists Of A Collection Of Events, The Last Of Which Could Also Change The Meaning Of The Whole, Not Because It Counts More Than The Previous Ones But Because Once They Are Included In A Life, Events Are Arranged In An Order That Is Not Chronological But, Rather, Corresponds To An Inner Architecture.
Order
Events
Lasts
You're The Sort Of Person Who, On Principle, No Longer Expects Anything Of Anything. There Are Plenty, Younger Than You Or Less Young, Who Live In The Expectation Of Extraordinary Experiences: From Books, From People, From Journeys, From Events, From What Tomorrow Has In Store. But Not You. You Know That The Best You Can Expect Is To Avoid The Worst.
Book
Journey
People
At Times The Mirror Increases A Thing’s Value, At Times Denies It.
Mirrors
Deny
Increase
Everything Has Already Begun Before, The First Line Of The First Page Of Every Novel Refers To Something That Has Already Happened Outside The Book.
Book
Lines
Statistics
One Reads Alone, Even In Another's Presence.
If One Wanted To Depict The Whole Thing Graphically, Every Episode, With Its Climax, Would Require A Three-dimensional, Or, Rather, No Model: Every Experience Is Unrepeatable. What Makes Lovemaking And Reading Resemble Each Other Most Is That Within Both Of Them Times And Spaces Open, Different From Measurable Time And Space.
Sex
Reading
Space
The Close-up Has No Equivalent In A Narrative Fashioned Of Words. Literature Is Totally Lacking In Any Working Method To Enable It To Isolate A Single Vastly Enlarged Detail In Which One Face Comes Forward To Underline A State Of Mind Or Stress The Importance Of A Single Detail In Comparison With The Rest. As A Narrative Device, The Ability To Vary The Distance Between The Camera And The Object May Be A Small Thing Indeed, But It Makes For A Notable Difference Between Cinema And Oral Or Written Narrative, In Which The Distance Between Language And Image Is Always The Same.
Distance
Stress
Differences
I Had Fallen In Love. What I Mean Is: I Had Begun To Recognize, To Isolate The Signs Of One Of Those From The Others, In Fact I Waited For These Signs I Had Begun To Recognize, I Sought Them, Responded To Those Signs I Awaited With Other Signs I Made Myself, Or Rather It Was I Who Aroused Them, These Signs From Her, Which I Answered With Other Signs Of My Own . . .
Mean
Facts
Made
A Classic Is A Book That Has Never Finished Saying What It Has To Say.
Art
Book
Literature
A Human Being Becomes Human Not Through The Casual Convergence Of Certain Biological Conditions, But Through An Act Of Will And Love On The Part Of Other People.
People
And Love
Casual
Novels As Dull As Dishwater, With The Grease Of Random Sentiments Floating On Top.
Grease
Floating
Dull
Every Choice Has Its Obverse, That Is To Say A Renunciation, And So There Is No Difference Between The Act Of Choosing And The Act Of Renouncing
Differences
Choices
Renunciation
Literature Remains Alive Only If We Set Ourselves Immeasurable Goals, Far Beyond All Hope Of Achievement. Only If Poets And Writers Set Themselves Tasks That No One Else Dares Imagine Will Literature Continue To Have A Function.
Goal
Achievement
Tasks
Falsehood Is Never In Words; It Is In Things.
Honesty
Falsehood
Your First Book Already Defines You, While You Are Really Far From Being Defined. And This Definition Is Something You May Then Carry With You For The Rest Of Your Life, Trying To Confirm It Or Extend Or Correct Or Deny It; But You Can Never Eliminate It.
Book
Trying
May
I Have Tried To Remove Weight, Sometimes From People, Sometimes From Heavenly Bodies, Sometimes From Cities; Above All I Have Tried To Remove Weight From The Structure Of Stories And From Language.
Cities
People
Stories
Seek And Learn To Recognize Who And What, In The Midst Of Inferno, Are Not Inferno, Then Make Them Endure, Give Them Space
Space
Giving
Inferno
Memories Images, Once They Are Fixed In Words, Are Erased.
Memories
Fixed
New York Is Perhaps The Only Place In America Where You Feel At The Centre And Not At The Margins, In The Provinces, So For That Reason I Prefer Its Horror To This Privileged Beauty, Its Enslavement To The Freedoms Which Remain Local And Privileged And Very Particularized, And Which Do Not Represent A Genuine Antithesis.
New York
America
Horror
This Is What I Mean When I Say I Would Like To Swim Against The Stream Of Time: I Would Like To Erase The Consequences Of Certain Events And Restore An Initial Condition. But Every Moment Of My Life Brings With It An Accumulation Of New Facts, And Each Of These New Facts Bring With It Consequences; So The More I Seek To Return To The Zero Moment From Which I Set Out, The Further I Move Away From It. . . .
Zero
Moving
Mean
I Could Distinguish The Shape Of Her Bosom, Her Arms, Her Thighs, Just As I Remember Them Now, Just As Now, When The Moon Has Become That Flat, Remote Circle, I Still Look For Her As Soon As The First Sliver Appears In The Sky, And The More It Waxes, The More Clearly I Imagine I Can See Her, Her Or Something Of Her, But Only Her, In A Hundred, A Thousand Different Vistas, She Who Makes The Moon The Moon And, Whenever She Is Full, Sets The Dogs To Howling All Night Long, And Me With Them.
Dog
Moon
Night
The Line Between The Reality That Is Photographed Because It Seems Beautiful To Us And The Reality That Seems Beautiful Because It Has Been Photographed Is Very Narrow.
Beautiful
Reality
Lines
The Novels That Attract Me Most Are Those That Create An Illusion Of Transparency Around A Knot Of Human Relationships As Obscure, Cruel, And Perverse As Possible.
Illusion
Obscure
Knots
The Ideal Place For Me Is The One In Which It Is Most Natural To Live As A Foreigner.
Travel
Natural
Exile
To Write Well About The Elegant World You Have To Know It And Experience It To The Depths Of Your Being... What Matters Is Not Whether You Love It Or Hate It, But Only To Be Quite Clear About Your Position Regarding It.
Hate
Writing
What Matters
You Reach A Moment In Life When, Among The People You Have Known, The Dead Outnumber The Living. And The Mind Refuses To Accept More Faces, More Expressions: On Every New Face You Encounter, It Prints The Old Forms, For Each One It Finds The Most Suitable Mask.
Expression
People
Mind
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