Depression Quotations | Page 7

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.

No one who lived through the Great Depression can ever look upon an unemployed person with anything but compassion. To me, there is no greater tragedy than a breadwinner willing to work, with a job skill but unable to find a market for that job skill. Back in those dark depression days I saw my father on a Christmas eve open what he thought was a Christmas greeting from his boss. Instead, it was the blue slip telling him he no longer had a job. The memory of him sitting there holding that slip of paper and then saying in a half whisper, 'That's quite a Christmas present,' it will stay with me as long as I live.

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

Recession is when a neighbour loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

I am not mad; I would to heaven I were! For then, 'tis like I should forget myself; O, if I could, what grief should I forget!

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.

I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.

The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.

The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

.....every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.

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.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

Onions make me sad. A lot of people don't realize that.

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

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

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.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care, nor your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

... And then I heard them lift a box, And creak across my soul With those same boots of lead, again, Then space began to toll.

I cling to nowhere until I fall - the crash of Nothing...

Every man has his secret sorrows...

In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

I believe that everyone experiences depression to some degree at some time in their lives. And there are probably millions of people who live with a low level of sadness and heaviness day in and day out.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

A positive attitude gives you power over your circumstances instead of your circumstances having power over you.

It often happens that those who spend their time giving light to others, remain in darkness themselves.

In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

You know what scares me? When you have to be nice to some paranoid schizophrenic, just because she lives in your head.

Madness is a kind of mental suicide.

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

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 ...

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

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.

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.

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.

There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.

Depression is inertia.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

There's nothing wrong with you that a little Prozac and a polo mallet can't cure.