Depression quotes
634 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside depression — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them -- every day begin the task anew."
"Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it."
"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."
"Only that day dawns to which we are awake."
"I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about."
"Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us."
"The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being."
"There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself."
"I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day.... my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud."
"Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself."
"There is no great genius without a mixture of madness."
"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
"Remember that the smallest seed of faith is of more worth than the largest fruit of happiness."
"The nearer the dawn the darker the night."
"If someone decides they're not going to be happy, it's not your problem. You don't have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity."
"In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement."
"If you never change your mind, why have one?"
"I may be a lunatic, but then, wasn't my lunacy caused by a monster that lurks at the bottom of every human mind? Those who call me a madman and spurn me may become lunatics tomorrow. They harbor the same monster."
"Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain."
"You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid."
