Depressing quotes
587 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily laying down."
"A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle."
"It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death."
"Enthusiasm reaches out with joy, for there is nothing depressing about it; it reaches out in faith, for there is no fear in it; it reaches out with acceptance, for there is no doubt in it; it reaches out as a child for there is no uncertainty about it."
"The depressing thing about an Englishman's traditional love of animals is the dishonesty thereof ... Get a barbed hook into the upper lip of a salmon, drag him endlessly around the water until he loses his strength, pull him to the bank, hit him on the head with a stone, and you may well become fisherman of the year. Shoot.the salmon and you'll never be asked again."
"There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas."
"Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live."
"It's very depressing to live in a time where it's easier to break an atom than a prejudice."
"In order to learn true humility (I use this expression to describe the state of mind under discussion), it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see that Christ withdrew when the people wanted to proclaim him king as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for a true balance to come about. Here, of course, individuality is very decisive."
"I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves."
"The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape."
"You ask if you look good and you know people are lying. It was a depressing thing to experience. I was going to these parties where I used to be ignored and then all of a sudden people are paying attention to me."
"We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to make public opinion subservient to their murderous ends."
"Human existence is an error...it is bad today and every day it gets worse, until the worst happens."
"It is the greatest of crimes to depress true art and science."
"The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage."
"If you go into the eastern bloc countries we are huge, and in Russia. Maybe there is something about the depressing nature of our music and lyrics that some people find an affinity with."
"A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every page I have turned in life."
"The chief problem about death ... is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought."
"A woman who utters such disgusting and depressing noise has no right to be anywhere, no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible. Don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon."
