Depression Quotes! 395 Depression Sayings about Mental Health

Depression Quotes

  • “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” ―Wayne Dyer
  • “Keep yourself busy if you want to avoid depression. For me, inactivity is the enemy.” ―Matt Lucas
  • “Life is not a dress rehearsal. Every day, you should have at least one exquisite moment.” ―Sally Karioth
  • “The only cure I have ever known for fear and doubt and loneliness is an immense love of self.” ―Alison Malee
  • “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” ―William James
  • “If you are in a bad mood go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood go for another walk.” ―Hippocrates
  • “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” ―Leonard Cohen

Sad Quotes about Depression

  • “Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.” ―Dick Cavett
  • “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” ―Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • “What they don’t tell you about depression is that sometimes it feels a lot less like sadness and a lot more like the emotional equivalent of watching paint dry.” —Alexis, Tumblr
  • “That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.” ―J.K. Rowling
  • “The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can’t get away from it. Not ever.” ―Nina LaCour, Hold Still
  • “My mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile! Why don’t you ever smile?” and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.” ―Charles Bukowski
  • “There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.” ―Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
  • “I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.” ―Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
  • “Being sad and being depressed are two different things. Also, people going through depression don’t look so, while someone sad will look sad. The most common reaction is, ‘How can you be depressed? You have everything going for you. You are the supposed number one heroine and have a plush home, car, movies… What else do you want?’” —Deepika Padukone

Depression Quotes about Life

  • “When people don’t know exactly what depression is, they can be judgmental.” ―Marion Cotillard
  • “Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.” ―Pythagoras
  • “In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “You’re like a grey sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.” ―Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
  • “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” ―Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation
  • “I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.” ―Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
  • “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.” ―Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
  • “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” ―John Keats, Letters of John Keats
  • “I’m not grateful for depression, but it honestly made me work harder and gave me the drive that I have to succeed and to make it work.” ―Lili Reinhart
  • “If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.” ―Clifford Odets
  • “A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.” ―P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories
  • “Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.” ―Swami Sivananda
  • “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.” ―Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
  • “Mental illness lives all around us every day. I’ve seen it in other family members, I’ve seen it in friends, and I’ve dealt with it myself with my own postpartum depression.” ―Rachel Hollis
  • “Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga.” ―Kripalvanandji
  • “The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud — the obstacles of life and its suffering…” ―Goldie Hawn
  • “When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.” ―Fiona Apple
  • “Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.” ―Stephen Fry
  • “The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.” ―Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
  • “I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.” ―Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
  • “I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible…” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.” ―Marian Keyes, Anybody Out There?

Depression Quotes about Love

  • “Healing is an art. It takes time, it takes practice. It takes love.” ―Maza Dohta
  • “You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” ―Buddha
  • “You always say such lovely things to me, Red. Do you say them to yourself?” ―Talia Hibbert
  • “The broken will always be able to love harder than most because once you’ve been in the dark, you learn to appreciate everything that shines.” —Anonymous
  • “I disliked myself so intensely. It was just a mindset. I didn’t know how to love myself. I didn’t know how to love anybody.” ―Anne Hathaway
  • “Getting better from depression demands a lifelong commitment. I’ve made that commitment for my life’s sake and for the sake of those who love me.” ―Susan Polis Schutz, poet
  • “A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.” ―Andrew Solomon
  • “The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.” —Tenzin Gyatso
  • “Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.” ―Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
  • “When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.” ―Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
  • “I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about if you loved me you would.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are. They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” ―Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
  • “Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.” ―Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

Depression Sayings

  • “Your silence furnishes a dark house.”
  • “I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave.”
  • “You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don’t stay children forever.”
  • “This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling.”
  • “Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings.”
  • “So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do.”
  • “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs.”
  • “Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity.”
  • “It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out.”
  • “At heart, I have always been a coper, I’ve mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I’ve always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown.”
  • “It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required.”
  • “You’re fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing.”
  • “How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
  • “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.”

Inspirational Depression Quotes

  • “There is hope, even when your brain tell you there isn’t.” ―John Green
  • “The only thing more exhausting than being depressed is pretending that you’re not.” —Anonymous,
  • “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” ―Jonathan Safran Foer
  • “Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it.” ―Dennis P. Kimbro
  • “The simple solution for siappointment depression: Get up and get moving. Physically move. Do. Act. Get going.” ―Peter Mcwilliams
  • “Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative you can get beyond your pain or negativity.” ―Yoko Ono
  • “The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one’s sympathy the gloom of someboyd else.” ―Arnold Bennett
  • “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.” ―Stephen Fry
  • “Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again.” ―The absence of hope.

Deep Depression Quotes

  • “Once you choose hope, anything is possible.” —Christopher Reeve
  • “There are far, far better things ahead than anything we leave behind.” —C.S. Lewis
  • “Keep yourself busy if you want to avoid depression. For me, inactivity is the enemy.” —Matt Lucas
  • “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” —Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
  • “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
  • “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” —Helen Keller
  • “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” —Leonard Cohen
  • “A positive attitude gives you power over your circumstances instead of your circumstances having power over you.” —Joyce Meyer, Power Thoughts: 12 Strategies To Win the Battle of the Mind
  • “Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground
  • “Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.” —Grenville Kleiser
  • “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.” —Fred Rogers
  • “A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl.” —Stephan Hoeller

Great Depression Quotes

  • “Depression is focusing on yourself; on your troubles and what is not right. You can’t be depressed if you are focusing on others. It’s impossible.” ―Elizabeth Bourgeret
  • “Become aware of yourself. Everything will come to you, Chinmay, when you are in that most wonderful place on earth, the centre of your being. If you learn just one thing from this book, let it be that once you are aware of yourself, depression cannot hold you back any more than a tiger can be trapped in a spider’s web.” ―Indu Muralidharan
  • “Do you want to be in your own story or on the outside writing about it? Everyone battles fear and uncertainty every day. However, the only failure in life is believing that your value relies on other people’s approval or resources. The reality is this: When you are living your authentic self and not how people want you to act, then you are free to use the full spectrum of your creativity and gifts. People don’t need resources to get out of any life situation. They need creativity to create resources. When you realize that, becoming stuck is impossible.” ―Shannon L. Alder
  • “You say you’re ‘depressed’ — all I see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective — it just means you’re human.” ―David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
  • “Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.” ―Albert Camus
  • “Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up.” ―Steve Maraboli

Quotes About Depression And Anxiety

  • “Tears are words that need to be written.” ―Paulo Coelho
  • “Imagination has a great deal to do with winning.” ―Mike Krzyzewski
  • “A champion needs a motivation above and beyond winning.” ―Pat Riley
  • “Sadness flies away on the wings of time.” ―Jean de La Fontaine
  • “Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.” ―Dodie Smith
  • “It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.” ―Maya Angelou
  • “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.” ―Robert Frost
  • “When you forgive, you in no way change the past – but you sure do change the future.” ―Bernard Meltzer
  • “Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way.” ―Leroy Satchel Paige
  • “Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.” ―William Hazlitt
  • “We must understand that sadness is an ocean, and sometimes we drown, while other days we are forced to swim.” ―R.M. Drake
  • “In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.” ―Lee Iacocca
  • Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business.” ―Norman Vincent Peale
  • “We are all on a life long journey and the core of its meaning, the terrible demand of its centrality is forgiving and being forgiven.” ―Martha Kilpatrick
  • “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ―C.S. Lewis
  • “I’ve learned that everything happens for a reason, every event has a why and all adversity teaches us a lesson… Never regret your past. Accept it as the teacher that it is.” ―Robin Sharma
  • “I was only 9 years old. At that time you don’t realize that you can work super hard and give everything you have and lose. It was the best message for me.” ―Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
  • “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” ―Leo Buscaglia
  • “What you thought before has led to every choice you have made, and this adds up to you at this moment. If you want to change who you are physically, mentally, and spiritually, you will have to change what you think.” ―Dr. Patrick Gentempo

Inspirational Quotes about Depression And Anxiety

  • “Minds are like parachutes, they function only when open.” ―Someone
  • “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.” —John Green
  • “Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.”—Jacques Prevert
  • “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”—Viktor E. Frankl
  • “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” —Confucius
  • “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” —Will Rogers
  • “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” —Albert Camus
  • “Give yourself another day, another chance. You will find your courage eventually. Don’t give up on yourself just yet.” ―Someone
  • “Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.” —Richard L. Evans
  • “You say you’re ‘depressed’ – all I see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective – it just means you’re human.”—David Mitchell

Motivational Quotes About Social Anxiety

  • “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “The fear of being laughed at makes coward of us all.” ―Mignon McLaughlin
  • “Someone’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.” ―Les Brown
  • “Even if you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward.” ―Victor Kiam
  • “He who fears he will suffer, already suffers from his fear.” ―Michel de Montaigne
  • “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” ―Mark Twain
  • “Difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations. The best is yet to come.” ―Zig Ziglar
  • “What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.” ―Martha
  • “I think that one thing that cause unhappiness is protracted anxiety and worry.” ―Derek Bok
  • “The moment I started treating my social anxiety disorder, I started feeling better.” ―Ricky Williams
  • “The best way to gain self-confidence is to do what you are afraid to do.” ―Unknown
  • “If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” ―Frank A. Clark
  • “Now that I have conquered social anxiety disorder, I find pleasure in fans approaching me.” ―Ricky Williams
  • “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.” ―Louisa May Alcott
  • “Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.” ―Glenn Turner

Inspirational Quotes About Beating Depression

  • “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” ―Albert Einstein
  • “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” ―F Scott Fitzgerald
  • “The wan who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” ―Confucius
  • “Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” ―Buddha
  • “There are far, far better things ahead than anything we leave behind.” ―C. S. Lewis
  • “Life is ten percent what you experience and ninety percent how you respond to it.” ―Dorothy M. Niedermeyer
  • “You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.” ―Dan Millman
  • “Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” ―Saint Francis Of Assisi
  • “Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside of you that is greater than any obstacle.” ―Christian D. Larson
  • “You don’t have to live a lie. Living a lie will mess you up. It will send you into depression. It will warp your values.” ―Gilbert Baker
  • “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.” ―Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Inspirational Quotes for Someone Feeling Depressed

  • “Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.” —Chuck Palahniuk
  • “I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.” —John Keats
  • “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by a**holes.” —@Debihope
  • “I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.” —Elizabeth Wurtzel, author
  • “The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.” —Victor Hugo
  • “It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.” —Matt Haig
  • “Whenever someone tells me to ‘Just be happy,’ I want to yell, ‘Oh, hey, depression’s gone! Why didn’t I think of that?’ But usually I just roll my eyes instead.” —Anonymous
  • “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” —Lao Tzu
  • “To those struggling with anxiety, OCD, depression: I know it’s mad annoying when people tell you to exercise, and it took me about 16 medicated years to listen. I’m glad I did. It ain’t about the ass, it’s about the brain.” —Lena Dunham
  • “Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.” —Ned Vizzini,
  • “That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.” —Elizabeth Wurtzel
  • “My mental health problems are real and they are valid. I will not judge myself for the bad days when I can barely get out of bed. I will not make myself feel worse because someone else appears to be handling their mental illness better than I am handling mine. Recovery is not a competition.” —Matt Joseph Diaz
  • “This is my depressed stance. When you’re depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you’ll start to feel better. If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this.” —Charles M. Schulz
  • “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.” —Stephanie Perkins
  • “Whether an illness affects your heart, your arm, or your brain, it’s still an illness, and there shouldn’t be any distinction. We would never tell someone with a broken leg that they should stop wallowing and get it together. We don’t consider taking medication for an ear infection something to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t treat mental health conditions any differently. Instead, we should make it clear that getting help isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a sign of strength—and we should ensure that people can get the treatment they need.” —Michelle Obama

Quotes about Depression and Feeling Alone

  • “There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” ―Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
  • “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.” ―Stephen Fry
  • “It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling — that really hollowed-out feeling.”— J.K. Rowling
  • “That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.” ―Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
  • “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
  • “I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” ―Sylvia Plath

Inspirational Quotes about Depression and Feeling Alone

  • “Depression is anger turned inward.” ―Sapphire, Push
  • “You don’t know where you are or where your dreams end and the world begins.” ―Rachel Klein
  • “Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.” ―Edward St. Aubyn
  • “However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people’s suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.” ―Dorothy Rowe
  • “Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is a plain and simple reduction of feeling.” ―Judith Guest
  • “Maybe all you need to pull you back from the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.” ―Leah Raeder
  • “Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.” ―Kay Redfield Jamison
  • “You didn’t get past something like that, you go through it — and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.” ―Jodi Picoult
  • “Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget.” ―Jennifer Elisabeth

Quotes about Overcoming Depression And Anxiety

  • “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” —Grantland Rice
  • “I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.” —Frida Kahlo
  • “Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” Thich Nhat Hanh
  • “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” Helen Keller
  • “Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others.” —Parker Palmer
  • “Suffering has been stronger than all other teachings and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”Charles Dickens
  • “I’ve certainly had periods when I felt like life was winning and I was losing, so I think everybody can relate to that quandary—the temptation to give in, to give up, and then what It takes to keep going.” —Malcolm Gets

Deep Quotes about Overcoming Depression and Anxiety

  • “Action is the antidote to despair.” —Joan Baez
  • “The harder you fall, the higher you bounce.” —Unknown author
  • “Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “Even from a dark night, songs of beauty can be born.” —Mary Anne Radmacher
  • “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” —Alexander Pope
  • “There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
  • “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” —Madeleine L’Engle
  • “We are not to blame for our illness, but we are responsible for our health.” —Victoria Maxwell
  • “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” ―Helen Keller
  • “Depression taught me the importance of compassion and hard work and that you can overcome enormous obstacles.” ―Rob Delaney
  • “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.” —Epicetus
  • “If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” —Mary Engelbreit
  • “Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.” —Jasmine Warga

Sad Quotes about Depression and Loneliness

  • “If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “But in the end, I’d be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?” ―Laurie Halse Anderson
  • “If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?” ―Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
  • “I want to nurture it, grow it, and cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.” ―Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
  • “Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.” ―John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
  • “I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts – you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.” ―D.D. Barant, Dying Bites
  • “It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.” ―Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
  • “Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors…Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat…What then was music created for? Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voices within ourselves? I think I know.” ―Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
  • “There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” ―T.H. White, The Once and Future King
  • “When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.” ―Elizabeth Gilbert

Coming Out Of Depression Quotes

  • “In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.” ―Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
  • “It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” ―Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
  • “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.
  • “You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” ―Virginia Woolf

Deep Quotes about Depression and Anxiety

  • “That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow.
  • “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.
  • “It doesn’t get better,” I said. “The pain. The wounds scab over and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you’ll never be the same.” ―Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
  • “There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,–when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.” ―Kate Chopin
  • “There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.” ―Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
  • “Sometimes I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.” ―Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Strong Depression Quotes and Sayings

  • “The strongest people are those who win battles we know nothing about.” ―Unknown
  • “What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation.” ―Glenn Close
  • “Your illness is not your identity. Your chemistry is not your character.” ―Pastor Rick Warren
  • “Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.” ―Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
  • “Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.” ―Elizabeth Wintzel
  • “In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” ―Albert Camus
  • “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.” ―Amy March, from “Little Women”
  • “Mental health…is not a destination, but a process. It’s about how you drive, not where you’re going.” ―Noam Shpancer, PhD
  • “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” ―Albus Dumbledore
  • “Promise me you’ll always remember — you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” ―Christopher Robin
  • “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have the right to be here.” ―Max Ehrmann
  • “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” ―Douglas Adams
  • “Even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.” ―Charlie from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”— Charles Bukowski
  • “A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.” ―Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
  • “If we start being honest about our pain, our anger, and our shortcomings instead of pretending they don’t exist, then maybe we’ll leave the world a better place than we found it.” ―Russell Wilson
  • “Some of the most comforting words in the universe are ‘me too.’ That moment when you find out that your struggle is also someone else’s struggle, that you’re not alone, and that others have been down the same road.” ―Unknown
  • “The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see–the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it.
  • “And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” ―David Foster Wallace
  • “I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?” – Billie Eilish
  • “All of that is still there. The only thing is, it’s not an option now. It’s just… a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness. It’s not a very likely possibility.” ―Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
  • “Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Hopeful Quotes about Depression

  • “The difference between hope and despair is the ability to believe in tomorrow.” ―Jerry Grillo
  • “Nothing has a hold on your mind that you cannot break free of.” ―Iyanla Vanzant
  • “The Universe has your back even when things aren’t working out the way you expected.” ―Gabby Bernstein
  • “Even when the world throws its worst and then turns its back, there is still always hope.” ―Pittacus Lore
  • “Never give up. Have hope. Expect only the best from life and take action to get it.” ―Catherine Pulsifer
  • “Anticipate good things will happen, keep your mind positive, never lose hope, and it will amaze you.” ―C Pulsifer
  • “In fact, hope is best gained after defeat and failure, because then inner strength and toughness is produced.” ―Fritz Knapp
  • “You cannot change anyone but yourself. Always hope for the best, but keep living your life no matter what.” ―Kate Anderson
  • “Even your past pain can be a blessing to someone. Hope lifters are willing to reach back and pass hope on.” ―Kathe Wunnenberg
  • “Every day of our lives, we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.” ―Mignon McLaughlin
  • “But keep on working and hoping still. For in spite of the grumblers who stand about, somehow, it seems, all things work out.” ―Edgar Guest
  • “Being depressed, all I needed was someone who could listen to me, believe in me, encourage me, but most of all, understand me.” ―Maxime Lagacé
  • “But no matter how much evil I see, I think it’s important for everyone to understand that there is much more light than darkness.” ―Robert Uttaro
  • “There is always hope for a new day, hope that the darkness won’t always seem impenetrable. There is always hope because our Redeemer lives.” ―Marcia Laycock
  • “You got this. One day at a time. You are resilient, courageous, and capable. Be proud of yourself. It isn’t easy enduring depression/anxiety.” ―The Anxiety Man (@RealAnxietyMan)
  • “It’s not too late to recover. You’re young, you’re tough. You’re adaptable. You can patch up your wounds, lift up your head and move on.” ―Haruki Murakami
  • “We can’t take away the suffering of others. What we can do is show up for them. And in doing so, take away the pain of having to suffer alone.” ―Jason Garner

Famous Quotes about Depression

  • “It’s hard to part the curtains when the dark holds such familiarity.” ―Donna Lynn Hope
  • “He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.” ―Jeffrey Eugenides
  • “I can feel the hurt. There’s something good about it. Mostly it makes me stop remembering.” ―Albert Borris
  • “Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one’s own skilled action.” ―Robert M. Sapolsky
  • “I keep telling you that feeling is not selective. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else either.” ―Judith Guest
  • “When your past shows up to haunt you, make sure it comes after supper so it doesn’t ruin your whole day.” ―Jay Wickre
  • “There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.” ―D.H. Lawrence
  • “I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.” ―Elizabeth Berg
  • “As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.” ―Edward Abbey
  • “Depression is not madness, it’s just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you’re depressed, you think you’re the only one to have ever tasted this kind of hurt. And that lonely self-regard brings with it its own painful pleasure.” ―Ana Menendez

Dealing with Depression Quotes

  • “What is depression like? It’s like drowning, except everyone around you is breathing.” ―Unknown
  • “Depression doesn’t take away your talents—it just makes them harder to find.” ―Lady Gaga
  • “Take control of your emotions before your emotions take control of you.” ―Scott Dye
  • “It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.”— Isaac Asimov
  • “There are times when explanations, no matter how reasonable, just don’t seem to help.” ―Unknown
  • “Caught in your youniverse again? Try reaching out to the one besides you!”― Stefan Emunds
  • “Only you can make yourself strong. Nobody else can do it for you.” ―Kim Pape
  • “A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.” ―Ian Fleming
  • “No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.” ―Jeanette LeBlanc
  • “There is a difference between depression and sadness. I am happy to be sad.” ―Amanda Mosher
  • “Every soul craves to fill the void. Only God can satisfy and set us free.” ―Lailah Gifty Akita
  • “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” ―Carl Jung
  • “There is no person in this whole world who is a mistake, no matter how different that person may seem.”– Fred Rogers
  • “Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.” ―John Piper
  • “It is okay to admit that your wounds are still open. That you are still healing. It takes time. It takes time.” ―Alison Malee
  • “I’m hurt, and I’m heartbroken, and I’m sad, and I’m depressed, and I’ve been crying, but I don’t wanna let it ruin my life.” ―Unknown
  • “If you often feel alone, ignored, or forgotten, think about this: closing the door and locking yourself in won’t change anything—literally and figuratively.” ―Richelle E. Goodrich
  • “Depression is feeling like you’ve lost something but having no clue when or where you last had it. Then one day you realize what you lost is yourself.” ―Unknown
  • “I was born with a great awareness of my surroundings and other people … Sometimes that awareness is good, and sometimes I wish I wasn’t so sensitive.” ―Scarlett Johansson
  • “If you have been brutally broken but still have the courage to be gentle to other living beings, then you’re a badass with a heart of an angel.” ―Keanu Reeves
  • “Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” ―Deepak Chopra
  • “I tend to get pretty depressed and I have some issues with anxiety and things like that … For me, it’s more psychological. Exercise is a means of expelling those demons.” ―Ryan Reynolds
  • “It is okay to have depression, it is okay to have anxiety and it is okay to have an adjustment disorder. We need to improve the conversation. We all have mental health in the same way we all have physical health.” ―Prince Harry

Motivational Quotes about Depression

  • “Suffering is not holding you; you are holding suffering.” ―Osho
  • “Not all storms come to disturb your life. Some come to clear your path.” ―Unknown
  • “Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.” ―Siri Hustvedt
  • “Nothing is more depressing than despite the fact of having it all but still feeling empty.” ―Unknown
  • “The greatest wisdom lies on the other side, immediately on the other side, of the greatest despair.” ―Alan Watts
  • “My life is just one constant battle between wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be lonely.” ―Unknown
  • “Difficult events occur for our spiritual growth. These aren’t meant to be punishment. Beautiful sunset awaits after heavy rain.” ―Haemin Sunim
  • “Meditation can and will order your thinking and therefore your mind. As we heal the wounded places in our minds, we grow.” ―Iyanla Vanzant
  • “We are always trying to build a bridge between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’. And in that, there is contradiction and conflict.” ―Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • “Depression is a gift. The only inconvenience is that you need to wait a few weeks, and sometimes a few years, to appreciate it. Be patient.” ―Maxime Lagacé

Great Depression Quotes

  • “Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.” ―Miriam Toews
  • “My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.” ―Patty Duke
  • “Just remember that the darkest night did not turn out all the stars.” –Louis Mann
  • “You sometimes think you want to disappear, but all you really want is to be found.” ―Unknown
  • “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ―Albert Camus
  • “I’ll never forget how depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.” ―Henry Rollins
  • “There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.” ―Miriam Toews
  • “I used to be good friends with my depression, saying oh I’m so depressed, or life is terrible.” ―Tony Curtis
  • “Sometimes when I say “I’m okay”, I want someone to look me in the eyes, and say, “I know you’re not.” ―Unknown
  • “A lot of people don’t realize that depression is an illness. I don’t wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.” ―Jonathan Davis

Short Depression Quotes and Sayings

  • “Just keep swimming.” ―Dory from “Finding Nemo”
  • “You are not your illness.” ―Julian Seifter
  • “Don’t let your struggle become your identity.” ―Unknown
  • “Smile, breathe, and go slowly.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
  • “Healing is an inside job.” ―Dr. B.J. Palmer
  • “The only way out is through.” ―Robert Frost
  • “Awareness is the first step in healing.” ―Dean Ornish
  • “Once you choose hope, anything is possible.” ―Christopher Reeve
  • “Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.” ―William James
  • “The only journey is the journey within.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
  • “It is okay to still be putting yourself together.” ―B.M.
  • “The mind is everything. What you think you become.” ―Buddha
  • “I am alive because you want me to.” ―Santosh Kalwar
  • “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” ―Fredrick Douglas
  • “Depression is like a war—you either win or die trying.” —Anonymous
  • “Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel
  • “Do not ever let agony get comfortable beneath your skin.” ―F.D. Soul
  • “Life is a battle, so do not give up fighting.” ―Savannah Harris
  • “Only stepping out of old ruts will bring new insights.” ―Andy Grove
  • “Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.” ―Janet Fitch
  • “Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I’m possible!” – Audrey Hepburn
  • “But if you’re broken, you don’t have to stay broken.” ―Selena Gomez
  • “Having depression is being in an abusive relationship with yourself.” ―Emily Dotterer
  • “I suffer from deep depression, so my only release is music.” ―Kevin Gates
  • “If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill, let yourself fall ill.” ―Jalaluddin Rumi
  • “Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.” ―Philip K. Dick
  • “I was so self-critical. I still am; but it’s not as bad anymore.” ―Fiona Apple
  • “But even at the risk of burning, the moth always seeks the light.” ―Elizabeth Acevedo
  • “Everything you have ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear.” ―George Addair

Depression Quotes and Sayings

  • “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Pain is emotional. Depression and fear are always in company with chronic hurting.” ―Siri Hustvedt
  • “I thought by masking the depression with silence, the feelings might disappear.” ―Sharon E. Rainey
  • “It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.” ―Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
  • “You must learn to let go. Release the stress. You were never in control anyway.” ―Steve Maraboli
  • “The way you speak of yourself, the way you degrade yourself, into smallness is abuse.” ―RUPI KAUR
  • “People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.” ―George Bernard Shaw
  • “You have a treasure within you that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.” ―Eckhart Tolle
  • “Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness.” ―Christy Lefteri
  • “A positive attitude gives you power over your circumstances instead of your circumstances having power over you.” ―Joyce Meyer
  • “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” ―Unknown
  • “Some people avoid thinking deeply in public, only because they are afraid of coming across as suicidal.” ―Mokokoma Mokhonoana
  • “Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.” ―Roy T. Bennett
  • “Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget about everything except what you’re going to do now — and do it.”— William Durant
  • “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” ―Unknown
  • “Depression isn’t always at 3am. Sometimes it happens at 3pm, while you’re with friends and you’re halfway through a laugh.” ―Unknown
  • “People with depression have something very valuable to teach us… how to live when it doesn’t ever feel good.” ―Kay Warren
  • “You have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”— Louise L. Hay
  • “Show me the most damaged parts of your soul, and I will show you how it still shines like gold.” ―Nikita Gill
  • “One of the most healing things you can do is recognize where in your life you are your own poison.” ―Steve Maraboli
  • “The world can ask you to participate, but it’s a day-today decision if you want to agree to that proposal.” ―Aimee Bender
  • “I don’t pay attention to the world ending. It has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.” ―Nayyirah Waheed
  • “There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.” ―Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  • “Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well.” ―Elizabeth Gilbert
  • “So you try to think of someone else you’re mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.” ―Ellen Hopkins
  • “I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.” ―Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
  • “Always end the day with a positive thought. No matter how hard things were, tomorrow is a fresh opportunity to make it better.” ―Unknown
  • “You will feel better than this, maybe not yet, but you will. You just keep living until you are alive again.” ―Call The Midwife
  • “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” ―Wayne W. Dyer
  • “I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even want to start this day because then I’ll just be expected to finish it.” ―Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
  • “If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.” ―Dr. Rollo May
  • “Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn’t change the heart of others– it only changes yours.” ―Shannon L. Alder, 300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It’s Too Late
  • “Pause your life if you need to, care for yourself lovingly, do not ignore your rest, slow down so you can take a deep breath.” ―YUNG PUEBLO
  • “If depression is creeping up and must be faced, learn something about the nature of the beast: You may escape without a mauling.” ―Dr. R. W. Shepherd
  • “I can’t eat and I can’t sleep. I’m not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?” ―Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
  • “I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.” ―Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
  • “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.” ―William Styron
  • “I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “I don’t want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • “I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn’t one I’ll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it’s worth it.” ―Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
  • No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.” ―Ashly Lorenzana
  • Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one.” ―Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
  • Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, “but there was nothing the matter with her.” ―Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
  • They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.” ―Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
  • “Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can’t make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don’t get back on track somehow, I’m dead, that’s the sense I get. There isn’t a single strong emotion inside me.” ―Banana Yoshimoto
  • The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.” ―J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (see more Catcher in the Rye quotes)
  • You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, and that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
  • “It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitably lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?” ―Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
  • “Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.” ―Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
  • “And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.” ―Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
  • “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” ―Herman Melville, Moby-Dick