Depression famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Psychoanalysts believe that the only "normal" people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
Some authors have conceptualized depression as a "depletion syndrome" because of the prominence of fatigability; they postulate that the patient exhausts his available energy during the period prior to the onset of the depression and that the depressed state represents a kind of hibernation, during which the patient gradually builds up a new story of energy.
-- Aaron T. Beck -
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 -
It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.
-- Adam Haslett -
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.
-- Al Alvarez -
We're in the money, the skies are sunny; old man depression, you are through, you done us wrong!
-- Al Dubin -
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
-- Alan Bennett -
I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.
-- Alan Cumming -
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
-- Albert Ellis -
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
-- Albert Ellis -
Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity in doubt.
-- Alexander Lowen -
The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.
-- Alice Miller -
Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
-- Amy Tan -
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 -
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
-- Andrew Solomon -
It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
-- Andrew Solomon -
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.
-- Andrew Solomon -
A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it ...
-- Andrew Solomon -
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 -
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
-- Andrew Solomon -
Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.
-- Ann Brashares -
Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.
-- Ann-Marie MacDonald -
On one level my sense of despair had been dispelled by therapy, yet on another it had not been replaced by either the desire for a future or the concept of one. I felt more aware of who I was, but that in itself-dominated as it was by sensations of fragmentation and isolation-filled me with no great hope, and in many ways only fuelled an appetite for destruction.
-- Anthony Loyd -
You've got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else...
-- Anthony Quinn -
Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.
-- Anthony Storr -
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
-- Antonin Artaud -
Sharing our depressions felt like having survived a war. The experience bonds you to the other person for life.
-- Art Buchwald -
It baseball is an American institution and more lasting than some marriages, war, Supreme Court decisions and even major depressions
-- Art Rust, Jr. -
It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant -
I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.
-- Audrey Niffenegger -
Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.
-- Banana Yoshimoto -
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.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs.
-- Barbara Marx Hubbard -
If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.
-- Ben Bernanke -
A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
-- Ben H. Winters -
I was horribly depressed, and I felt like I had failed as a band leader, a professional, as a person.
-- Ben Moody -
I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before.
-- Betsy Lerner -
For days on end, I would hardly speak, and when I did only the vilest sort of gibberish would spout forth. I became morose and fat. Unapproachable, except when eating - and then only by waiters.
-- Bette Midler -
It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.
-- Black Elk -
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
-- Blaise Pascal -
I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds.
-- Bob Dylan -
Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can.
-- Bob Geldof -
But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.
-- Bob Geldof -
For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.
-- Boethius -
I could feel myself begin to recede, to tip and lose balance, slide toward the deeper darkness that had crept in from outside. It happened so quickly and took me by surprise; sometimes I just turned around and found it there-ah, camarade-unaware it had been waiting for me for days.
-- Bryan Mealer -
The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.
-- C. L. R. James -
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 -
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 -
Whenever I get depressed, I raise my hemlines. If things don't change, I am bound to be arrested.
-- Calista Flockhart -
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-- Carl Jung -
Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.
-- Carroll Quigley -
I think I'm afraid of being happy because whenever I get too happy something bad always happens.
-- Charles M. Schulz -
A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbors near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them.
-- Charles Robert Maturin -
Those who try to "break on through to the other side" not only cannot predict what they may find there, but are themselves too often broken in the process.
-- Charles Shaar Murray -
Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.
-- Charles Spurgeon -
Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.
-- Charles Spurgeon -
I finally came to terms with manic depression and lithium. I've taken lithium regularly for the past few years and have had no further bouts with manic depression.
-- Charley Pride -
The Failure of Will theory is equally popular with people who are not depressed. Get out and take your mind off yourself, they say. You're too self-absorbed. This is just about the stupidest thing you can say to a depressed person, and it is said every day to depressed people all over this country. And if it isn't that, it's Shut up and take your Prozac.
-- Chase Twichell -
... I feel tired to death, paralyzed by this mysteriously wasted life's stubborn concentration on hopelessness and dissolution. It occurs to me that if I lie still like this for long enough, then I'll be dead when I finally wake again, and nothing can ever again torment me, beset me, or present me with evidence of my baseness and decay. That thought is the only one that can comfort me.
-- Christer Kihlman -
His impression was that he had been imprisoned in a shelter deep down in the underworld of his personality, listening and biding his time while insanity rushed like spring flood through the upper layer of his soul, roaring and crashing, leaving terrible destruction in its wake, a deserted, ravaged country. No, he hadn't been crazy, but something inside him had been crazy.
-- Christer Kihlman -
Depression is a very sensible reaction to just about everything we live in now.
-- Chrystos -
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
-- Chuck Palahniuk -
We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
-- Chuck Palahniuk -
Psychiatry's a young science. Yesterday's madman may be tomorrow's genius. Beethoven and Van Gogh were both a bit loopy. In my view, most madmen are remarkable. They're explorers, travelers beyond the rim of consciousness. Not surprising if they pick up a few bugs and get sick. That's all it is, madness. Mad just means sick. If you get fluid on the lungs it's pleurisy. If it's fluid on the brain, it's insanity.
-- Clare Boylan -
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
-- Claude Monet -
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.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
You don't have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you.
-- Dan Millman -
Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify a corresponding negative thought you had just prior to and during the depression. Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood.
-- David D. Burns -
Rituals, even unhappy ones, provide a measure of comfort. Like a superstitious ballplayer who will only use certain bats, my depression rituals have become a fixed, normal part of my life. ... I need rituals to prevent unnecessarily rocking my already shaky emotional boat.
-- David Karp -
There were times when depression, anxiety, whatever, would keep me from writing. I still get depressed and anxious, but I just don't let it stop me. I've just learned to move it to one side if I want to work.
-- David St. John -
I don't know why I feel so crazy...I feel like I'm going through a stargate. Maybe it's the diet pills. Maybe it's Buddha.
-- Dawn French -
Maybe I'm needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren't needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I'd obviously be psychotic.
-- Dean Koontz -
There are days-depression is a part of it-when if all you do is get dressed, take a shower and put on your makeup, then it is a good day. Your goals have to be much lower. But if you take one tiny little step, then you can take another and another.
-- Deborah Norville -
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
-- Dennis Lehane -
Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it?
-- Doris Grumbach -
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
-- Dorothy Rowe -
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 -
Life is like a movie, if you've sat through more than half of it and it’s sucked every second so far, it probably isn't going to get great right at the end and make it all worthwhile. None should blame you for walking out early.
-- Doug Stanhope -
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.
-- Douglas Coupland -
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
-- Edgar Allan Poe -
If you never change your mind, why have one?
-- Edward de Bono -
The madhouse is in a lot of places, not just a hospital, not just a palace, but also a pattern woven from threads so fine that no one can distinguish them, neither the Emperor nor the children, neither you nor I.
-- Einar Mar Guðmundsson -
When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.
-- Elayne Boosler -
Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt -
Work is always an antidote to depression.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt -
I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
-- Elizabeth Gilbert -
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
-- Elizabeth Gilbert -
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
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. The fog is like a cage without a key.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel
