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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"Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within."
"While each of us ... has depressed hours, none of us needs to be a depressed person."
"I became depressed and I cut my self with scissors and stuff."
"If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come."
"Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life."
"She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love."
"The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind."
"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
"To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it."
"There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime."
"At times of the severest depression, humor is what binds people together."
"He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it."
"It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it."
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. 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."
"When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was."
"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."
"A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use."
"Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens."
"Coming down off crack is like the worst depression. The worst."
"All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed... and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the I.R.S."
