Inside: Depression quotes can be hard to read, but they are worth the effort. They remind yourself that you’re not alone in the tough times.
Depression is a serious mental disorder characterized by low mood and decreased interest in activities that used to be enjoyed. It can be caused by a variety of things, such as stress, grief, or relationship problems. If left untreated, depression can lead to suicidal thoughts and actions.
There are many ways to deal with depression, and there is no “right” way to recover. However, treatment is often the best way to getting back on track and feel better again. Remember to talk to a doctor or therapist if you are feeling acutely depressed and need professional help.
Reading depression quotes can be overwhelming, but remember that there are people out there who understand what you are going through. They also can be quite inspirational, when used in the right way. Here are our latest collection of depression quotes to get you started:
Heartbroken depression quotes
Indeed, depression can feel like an overwhelming experience. But remember that you are not alone. Here are some depression quotes to remind yourself that you’re not alone in your experience.
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 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
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 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
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
Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it’s the worst.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.
Rumi
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.
Stephen Fry
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. Be there for them when they come through the other side.
Stephen Fry
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
Rollo May
Deep depression quotes
It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to feel lost. But don’t let those feelings define you. Don’t let them control your life. There is always light at the end of the tunnel, if you keep moving. These depression quotes can be a great reminder that there is always hope.
Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career.
Lawrence Klein
If you suffer from depression, anything that makes you feel has to the most important thing in your life, because it’s the only thing that can save you.
Siobhan Fahey
The worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived.
Katie McGarry
Our souls contained more scar tissue than life.
Katie McGarry
Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.
Jasmine Warga
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
When you’ve got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.
Truman Capote
Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression.
Robert A. Johnson
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
Depression quotes
Check out these depression quotes that can be incredibly poignant and provide valuable insight into the struggles that people with depression go through on a daily basis.
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
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 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
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. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault.
Margaret Atwood
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
Dolly Parton
There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.
Miriam Toews
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
I wonder if that’s how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out. I don’t want it to win.
Jasmine Warga
Inspiring depression quotes
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
Andrew Solomon
Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.
Richard Bach
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
James Hillman
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
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat – it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
Andrew Solomon
Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
Jasmine Warga
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
Susan Sontag
It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says, ‘Nothing good came of this’ is not yet listening.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The so–called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.
David Foster Wallace
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
Quotes about depression
Some of the depression quotes below reflect the sentiment that life goes on, even when we don’t feel like it does.
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
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn’t change the heart of others – it only changes yours.
Shannon Alder
Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.
Jennifer Elisabeth
No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
Maya Angelou
Depression isn’t just being a bit sad. It’s feeling nothing. It’s not wanting to be alive anymore.
J. K. Rowling
Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
Philip K. Dick
When a depressed person shrinks away from your touch it does not mean he is rejecting you. Rather he is protecting you from the foul, destructive evil which he believes is the essence of his being and which he believes can injure you.
Dorothy Rowe
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.’
Barbara Kingsolver
Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara Kingsolver
Hidden depression quotes
We know that depression is a common mental illness that affects millions of people around the world. It’s a serious condition that can cause severe mood swings, difficulty concentrating, and decreased appetite. The following depression quotes offer understanding to those who are feeling down:
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
Sivananda
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
In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.
Theodore Kaczynski
Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.
Ann–Marie MacDonald
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
Cesare Pavese
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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
Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
Nhat Hanh
Just like other illnesses, depression can be treated so that people can live happy, active lives.
Tom Bosley
Sad depression quotes
Here are some depression quotes that can embracing and give comforting to those who are struggling with the emotions of sadness:
You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
David Foster Wallace
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.
Anne Lamott
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
You’re like a grey sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.
Jasmine Warga
The sadness will last forever.
Vincent van Gogh
I saw the world from the stars’ point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.
Shaun David Hutchinson
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
There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.
Laurell K. Hamilton
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
I fear no monsters, for no monsters I see. Because all this time the monster has been me.
Nikita Gill
Positive depression quotes
Check out these depression quotes that can help you feel better about yourself and understand what it’s like to experience this difficult illness:
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
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
James Hillman
Sometimes I wonder if my heart is like a black hole––it’s so dense that there’s no room for light, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still suck me in.
Jasmine Warga
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
Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It’s just too much for them.
Phoebe Stone
If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill.
Rumi
Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.
Charlotte Brontë
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
Andrew Solomon
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn’t given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
Albert Ellis
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
Final thought
These depression quotes will remind you that you are not alone and that there is hope. They also provide words of encouragement to help you fight through your depression. Now is the time to reach out for help, whether it be from a therapist, family, friends, or a support group.
We hope our collection of depression quotes can be a start to your journey to healing. If you’re feeling down, try reaching out to someone you trust for support. And if there are any quotes that speak to you on a personal level, please feel free to share them with your friends and family. With enough love and understanding, anything is possible.
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