What Is It That Drags Us Down? | 122 Famous Quotes about Depression

It may be a phase or a continuous battle. Depression is not to be ignored, however once acknowledged there can be hope again. In spite of the negative affects on how one feels and behaves through the emotional turmoil, fortunately it can be treatable. Hope is always there for everyone, even if right now you may be sure there isn’t. The medical community has developed and is trying to offer sufferers a big part of, if not all of their life back and this is why many celebrities have come forward and talked about their personal experiences with moderate and severe cases of depression.

You and every other individual is not, and has never been alone in this struggle even in past centuries, great personas like Abraham Lincoln and today Lady Gaga have been more than familiar with your thoughts and feelings. Read on to find a remarkable selection of quotes other famous actors, artists, authors and more have expressed about this still on going encounter for some, and be inspired and encouraged yourself or share with friends and loved ones. Don’t forget help is always there, just one step away from anyone requiring it. You may contact https://www.phychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression or don’t hesitate to contact the corresponding office in your local area. Don’t put if off !

Depression Quotes to Help You Understand its Nature

• Depression is melancholy minus its charms. Susan Sontag
• Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. Albert Camus
• Depression is the inability to construct a future. Rollo May

• I think I’m afraid of being happy because whenever I get too happy something bad always happens. Charles M. Schulz
• Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Judith Guest
• Until you’ve had depression I don’t think you’re qualified to talk about it. Geoffrey Boycott
• The artist’s personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression. Eric Maisel

 

• 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.
  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
• 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
• There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. Haruki Murakami
• I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. Ursula K. Le Guin
• I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top. John Keats
• Depression is being colorblind and constantly told how colorful the world is. Atticus
• As I say I don’t want to kill myself, I just wouldn’t mind dying. Stephen Fry

• 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
• I don’t feel very much like Pooh today. Winnie the Pooh
• Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
  itself in violence–but more generally takes the form of apathy. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn’t sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.
  F. Scott Fitzgerald
• If you are depressed, you live in the past. If you are anxious, you live in the future. But if you are at peace, you live in the present. Lao Tzu
• There are times when explanations, no matter how reasonable, just don’t seem to help. Fred Rogers
• Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though. Jeffrey Eugenides

 

Inspirational Quotes About Depression

• The wound is the place where the light enters you. Rumi
• The nearer the dawn the darker the night. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars. Ursula K. Le Guin
• No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. Maya Angelou
• 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
• Storms make trees take deeper roots. Dolly Parton
• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Eleanor Roosevelt
• In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus
• All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming. Helen Keller

• It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Alice Walker
• Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. Confucius
• There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen
• 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
• 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
• 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, Les Misérables
• No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else. Charles Dickens
• Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge. Eckhart Tolle
• 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

• After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It’s better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life. Sophia Loren

 

Quotes to Help With Depression

• If you desire healing,
  let yourself fall ill
  let yourself fall ill.
  Rumi
• A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every page I have turned in life. Charlotte Brontë
• You don’t have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you. Dan Millman
• I’m tired of pretending that everything’s fine just so I can please everyone else. Spencer Tracy

• Therapy gives you another perspective when you are so lost in your own spiral, it helps. Jon Hamm
• Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. Francis of Assisi
• Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by a**holes. Unknown
• Depressed means you need deep rest from the character you’ve been playing in the world. Jim Carrey
• You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation…and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else. Hermann Hesse

• If you are in a bad mood go for a walk.If you are still in a bad mood go for another walk. Hippocrates
• It’s okay to not be okay all the time. Unknown
• It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
• You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes. Winnie the Pooh
• He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. Henry David Thoreau

• Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night. Philip K. Dick
• Numb the dark and you numb the light. Brené Brown
• The scientific evidence is clear that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety. Johann Hari
• One of the best things that helps depression is work, and socializing with other people and connecting. Because when you work you find purpose. Trevor Noah
• Never lose hope. This life is worth the struggle. Your future self is pleading with you to stay. You are more than your thoughts. You are more than your fears and stronger than you give yourself credit for. The Anxiety Man

• 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
• Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. J.D. Salinger
• The more you think life is about money, and status, and how you look to other people, the more vulnerable you are to depression and anxiety. Just like junk food has taken over our diets, junk values have taken over our minds and made us sick. Johann Hari
• When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind. Michel de Montaigne

 

Deep and Insightful Depression Quotes

• The shadows are as important as the light. Charlotte Brontë
• Life begins on the other side of despair. Jean-Paul Sartre
• Despair can never be dissolved through escape, but by observing it. Jiddu Krishnamurti
  
• The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy. Pete Wentz
• Going through anxiety or depression or any other psychological condition doesn’t make you unlovable – it makes you human. Seth J. Gillihan
• Suffering is an indication of ignorance, but in seeking an escape from suffering you are only nourishing ignorance. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? 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
• Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life. Homer
• Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living. Jo Nesbo
• I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that. Robin Williams
• It’s okay to worry; it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to get scared; it’s okay to be mad. It’s okay to embrace our humanity. In fact we don’t have any choice but to be the sensitive, vulnerable creatures we were made to be. Breathe. Let go a bit. It’s okay to be you just as you are. Jason Garner
• You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain. Sándor Márai, Embers

 

Being Depressed and Lonely Quotes

• 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
• 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
• I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does. Henry Rollins
• Depression is boring, I think
  and I would do better to make
  some soup and light up the cave.
  Anne Sexton
• There comes a time when something changes you… No matter the impact… Where the world no longer beats in time with you. You no longer feel amongst the fray.. And the feeling of loneliness is a brandished armor you wear the rest of your life. Solange Nicole

Depression Sad Quotes

• 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
• I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed. Stephen Fry
• The only thing more exhausting than being depressed is pretending that you’re not. Unknown
• Depression isn’t just being a bit sad. It’s feeling nothing. It’s not wanting to be alive anymore. J. K. Rowling
• Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer. Dorothy Rowe
• I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy. Franz Kafka
• It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me. John Howard Griffin
• Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
• Sometimes, when I say “I am ok”, I want someone to hold me tight, look me in the eyes and say “No, I know you are not”. Paulo Coelho, Hippie
• The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
• 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

 

Motivational Quotes For Depression

• There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering. Alan Watts
• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw
• You have to take responsibility for your own happiness. Reese Witherspoon
• One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Dale Carnegie
• Step out of the history that is holding you back. Step into the new story you are willing to create. Oprah Winfrey
• Real change will come about not as a result of prayer, but of using intelligence and taking action. Dalai Lama
• Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• If you’re going through hell, keep going. Winston Churchill
• The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. Dolly Parton
• You need to know that part of being strong and tough is having the courage to ask for help when you need it. You must not silently suffer. Prince Harry

 

Quotes by Famous People Who Fought With Depression

• I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture. Claude Monet
• I am really very, very tired of everything – more than tired. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Cartooning will destroy you; it will break your heart. Charles M. Schulz (creator of Peanuts)
  
• 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. Abraham Lincoln
• I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it appears to me. Abraham Lincoln
• I need one of those long hugs where you kinda forget whatever else is happening around you for minute. Marilyn Monroe
• 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
• 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
• Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. Oscar Wilde
• Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum. Vincent van Gogh
• Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. 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, Notebooks 1951-1959
• I was so self-critical. I still am; but it’s not as bad anymore. Fiona Apple
• me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can’t pull out of it. But I don’t consider myself negative-negative. I’m positive-negative. Tim Burton
• The scrutiny that young people face on social media can lead to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. Lady Gaga
• We are all spirits. We get depressed. But music makes you want to live. I know my music has saved my life. Mary J. Blige
• There was a time when I was 19 when I really, really, really thought I was going crazy. I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression. Winona Ryder
• That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward. Ernest Hemingway
• I’m currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn’t really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
• 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
• It was such a depressing time. I didn’t look very depressed, maybe, but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way. Zaha Hadid

 

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