Weltschmerz.

“Weltschmerz” (“world-pain”) is a German term closely associated with the early Romantic era and is widely credited to the novelist and satirist Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter). It emerges from the late-18th/early-19th-century mood of heightened sensibility, in which writers framed melancholy not merely as private sadness but as a response to the perceived mismatch between the world as it is and the world as one feels it ought to be. In Jean Paul’s usage, the word functions less as a standalone aphorism than as a coined label for a recognizable emotional-intellectual condition circulating among educated readers of his time.

As a standalone utterance, “Weltschmerz” functions less like a proposition than a diagnosis: it names a complex emotional stance toward the world. The term suggests sorrow not merely from personal misfortune but from a perceived structural mismatch between what one longs for (beauty, justice, meaning, transcendence) and what the world delivers (imperfection, compromise, finitude). In Romantic usage it can imply both sensitivity and paralysis—an acute moral or aesthetic awareness that becomes a burden. In a quotations database, it is best treated as a keyword-quote: a crystallization of a cultural mood rather than a complete sentence.