Weltschmerz

And in this respect [Ludwig] Uhland presents a marked and useful contrast to the lackadaisical, sentimental, Weltschmerz school, the poets of which trade on their own pretended misery, and, cunningly enough, suggest that their poems must be touching and true in proportion as the authors set themselves forth as peculiarly skilled in bitterness of heart and badness of life.

[page 118] It speaks well for the general healthiness of the English nation that we have no words corresponding to ‘Weltschmerz’ or ‘Ennui’. The ordinary Englishman experiences neither of these things. […] [page 119] Weltschmerz is a species of disease, a sort of spiritual measles—or to give a more technical diagnosis, it is the revolt of a young soul against the stone and iron of existence. […] ‘Ennui’ only attacks people either of hopeless incapacity or incurable laziness. Weltschmerz on the other hand is a positive, restless, state, a state of protest against the nature of things.

The artificial woe of the ancient armorist, whose days were a perpetual honeyed despair and his nights one long lachrymose vigil, is an extinct literary tradition; but a new, a different, and, alas! a more real sadness has taken its place—the modern world-sadness, the Weltschmerz, which infects all we do and are, not excepting our love-making— […]

Here we have it at once, blended though it may be with the new elements of purging humour and all-embracing Weltschmerz, in [William] Shakespeare's Hamlet.

[Henry] Koerner's painting did have the heaviness, the harsh humor and the all-pervading weltschmerz which characterized German expressionism in the 1920s.

A man-to-man touch then on his buttoned epaulet. A middle-aged smile full of Weltschmerz.

The country was fat with peacetime prosperity, but lots of people were afflicted with a postwar funk called weltschmerz. They were depressed by what they'd seen of the "civilized" world. Soon whole bunches of people in their 20s and 30s moved to ski towns, checking out of the mainstream altogether. Their goal was no more lofty than having the freedom to spend day after endless day in a peaceful bubble, close to nature and on snow-covered slopes. Here was the weltschmerz antidote—and the birth of the parallel universe.

Execution, the band's second record, burns with intense weltschmerz, its existential crises cloaked in buoyant instrumental hooks and shimmery arrangements.

[Henry] Koerner's painting did have the heaviness, the harsh humor and the all-pervading weltschmerz which characterized German expressionism in the 1920s.

The country was fat with peacetime prosperity, but lots of people were afflicted with a postwar funk called weltschmerz. They were depressed by what they'd seen of the "civilized" world. Soon whole bunches of people in their 20s and 30s moved to ski towns, checking out of the mainstream altogether. Their goal was no more lofty than having the freedom to spend day after endless day in a peaceful bubble, close to nature and on snow-covered slopes. Here was the weltschmerz antidote—and the birth of the parallel universe.