Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ben Moody

I was horribly depressed, and I felt like I had failed as a band leader, a professional, as a person.

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.

Blaise Pascal

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Alain de Botton

As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.

You can tell a difference in them from the very first month. Once they have been given permission to be a woman, the depression lifts.

Alexander Lowen

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.

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.

Stephen Fry

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.

Stefan Zweig

I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.

Susanna Kaysen

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

Suzanne Collins

Something small and quiet, like a match being struck, lights up the gloom inside of me.

Sylvia Plath

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

Sylvia Plath

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

Sylvia Plath

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Sylvia Plath

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Sylvia Plath

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Sylvia Plath

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. 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.

Rollo May

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Rollo May

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Tom Bosley

I want to help people with depression understand that there is hope, so that they can get the help they need to live rich, fulfilling lives.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories

Spencer Tracy

I'm tired of pretending that everything's fine just so I can please everyone else.

Spike Milligan

I have got so low that I have asked to be hospitalized and for deep narcosis (sleep). I cannot stand being awake. The pain is too much... Something has happened to me, this vital spark has stopped burning - I go to a dinner table now and I don't say a word, just sit there like a dodo. Normally I am the centre of attention, keeps the conversation going, - so that is depressing in itself. It's like another person taking over, very strange. The most important thing I say is 'good evening' and then I go quiet.

Stuart Chase

The decline is in paper values, not in tangible goods and services...America is now in the eighth year of prosperity as commercially defined. The former great periods of prosperity in America averaged eleven years. On this basis we now have three more years to go before the tailspin.

Stuart Appleby

I can certainly see how people are overcome by depression.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Sebastian Faulks

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

Ray Brown

Coming down off crack is like the worst depression. The worst.

Siobhan Fahey

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

Depression scares people off. It makes me laugh that it has that kind of effect.

Sinead O'Connor

I had developed manic depression [bipolar disorder] ... and the main symptoms the constant voice in the head telling you to kill yourself.