The truth is that we all have secret sorrows that we hide from the rest of the world. That’s why we all feel down sometimes, and that’s perfectly normal.
However, if it feels to you that you just can’t snap out of it, these powerful depression quotes will definitely help you.
These inspirational quotes have a healing effect, and in those moments when we don’t feel like ourselves, that’s something we all need; a cure to help us find the relief and overcome that darkness we feel.
Also, if your loved one is going through a difficult period, it’s your task to support them.
The most important thing for a person who suffers from depression is to know that they have unconditional support from their loved ones.
Unfortunately, this ‘modern world’ and social media affect our mental health greatly. We are all becoming stuck in that virtual world and losing touch with reality, making us feel lonely, sad and depressed.
However, there is a way out. You can overcome depression because you’re strong, even stronger than you think. Fight back and don’t allow it to take control over your life. Instead, make your life easier.
Inspirational depression quotes
These deep depression quotes will motivate you to be brave and hold on just a little bit more because those challenging moments you’re going through right now will pass.
1. “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.” – Stephen Fry
2. “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
3. “One of the most healing things you can do is recognize where in your life you are your own poison.” – Steve Maraboli
4. “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
5. “You got this. One day at a time. You are resilient, courageous, and capable. Be proud of yourself. It isn’t easy enduring depression/anxiety.” – The Anxiety Man (@RealAnxietyMan)
6. “Depression is not madness, it’s just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you’re depressed, you think you’re the only one to have ever tasted this kind of hurt. And that lonely self-regard brings with it its own painful pleasure.” – Ana Menendez
7. “Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.” – Kay Redfield Jamison
8. “Getting better from depression demands a lifelong commitment. I’ve made that commitment for my life’s sake and for the sake of those who love me.” – Susan Polis Schutz
9. “I tend to get pretty depressed, and I have some issues with anxiety and things like that… For me, it’s more psychological. Exercise is a means of expelling those demons.” – Ryan Reynolds
10. “At heart, I have always been a coper, I’ve mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I’ve always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I’d be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
11. “The only cure I have ever known for fear and doubt and loneliness is an immense love of self.” – Alison Malee
12. “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
13. “A lot of people don’t realize that depression is an illness. I don’t wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.” – Jonathan Davis
14. “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
15. “Depression doesn’t take away your talents – it just makes them harder to find.” – Lady Gaga
16. “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.” – Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
17. “However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people’s suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.” – Dorothy Rowe
18. “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, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
19. “Depression is feeling like you’ve lost something but having no clue when or where you last had it. Then one day you realize what you lost is yourself.” – Unknown
20. “It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitably lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?” – Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
21. “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. 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
22. “It is okay to have depression, it is okay to have anxiety, and it is okay to have an adjustment disorder. We need to improve the conversation. We all have mental health in the same way we all have physical health.” – Prince Harry
23. “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
24. “Being depressed, all I needed was someone who could listen to me, believe in me, encourage me, but most of all, understand me.” – Maxime Lagacé
25. “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
26. “I’m not grateful for depression, but it honestly made me work harder and gave me the drive that I have to succeed and to make it work.” – Lili Reinhart
27. “When you come out of the grips of a depression, there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker… but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.” – Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
28. “If depression is creeping up and must be faced, learn something about the nature of the beast: You may escape without a mauling.” – Dr. R. W. Shepherd
29. “Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga.” – Kripalvanandji
30. “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, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
31. “If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.” – Dr. Rollo May
32. “Keep yourself busy if you want to avoid depression. For me, inactivity is the enemy.” – Matt Lucas
Short depression quotes
These inspirational quotes on depression will inspire you to look at things differently. The truth is that you have more power over your anxiety and depression than you think.
1. “I’m hurt, and I’m heartbroken, and I’m sad, and I’m depressed, and I’ve been crying, but I don’t wanna let it ruin my life.” – Unknown
2. “Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.” – Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
3. “What is depression like? It’s like drowning, except everyone around you is breathing.” – Unknown
4. “You don’t have to live a lie. Living a lie will mess you up. It will send you into depression. It will warp your values.” – Gilbert Baker
5. “Maybe we all have darkness inside of us, and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.” – Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
6. “There is a difference between depression and sadness. I am happy to be sad.” – Amanda Mosher
7. “Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.” – Janet Fitch
8. “I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.” – Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
9. “I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?” –Billie Eilish
10. “If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.” – Brené Brown
11. “Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.” – Edward St. Aubyn
12. “Don’t let your struggle become your identity.” – Unknown
13. “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” – Albus Dumbledore
14. “There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.” – Miriam Toews
15. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” – Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation
16. “I suffer from deep depression, so my only release is music.” – Kevin Gates
17. “I used to be good friends with my depression, saying oh I’m so depressed, or life is terrible.” – Tony Curtis
18. “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.” – Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
19. “What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation.” – Glenn Close
20. “If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
21. “Depression is anger turned inward.” – Sapphire, Push
22. “When people don’t know exactly what depression is, they can be judgmental.” – Marion Cotillard
23. “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
24. “My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.” – Patty Duke
25. “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” – Sylvia Plath, Ariel
26. “Mental health…is not a destination, but a process. It’s about how you drive, not where you’re going.” – Noam Shpancer, PhD
27. “Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
28. “Having depression is being in an abusive relationship with yourself.” – Emily Dotterer
29. “Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one’s own skilled action.” – Robert M. Sapolsky
30. “Pain is emotional. Depression and fear are always in company with chronic hurting.” – Siri Hustvedt
31. “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
32. “Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent. It is a plain and simple reduction of feeling.” – Judith Guest
33. “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” – Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
34. “It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.” – Matt Haig
35. “It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.” – Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
36. “Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.” – Miriam Toews
37. “If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.” – Hippocrates
38. “Depression isn’t always at 3 am. Sometimes it happens at 3 pm, while you’re with friends and you’re halfway through a laugh.” – Unknown
39. “Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.” – Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
40. “Depression has nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad.” – Unknown
41. “Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.” – Pythagoras
42. “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
43. “Depression taught me the importance of compassion and hard work and that you can overcome enormous obstacles.” – Rob Delaney
44. “People with depression have something very valuable to teach us… how to live when it doesn’t ever feel good.” – Kay Warren
Depression quotes about life
1. “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. 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, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
2. “Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.” – Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
3. “I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts – you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do, right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.” – D.D. Barant, Dying Bites
4. “I think one thing is that anybody who’s had to contend with mental illness – whether it’s depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever – actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they’ve had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.” – Kay Redfield Jamison
5. “Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another.” – Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
6. “Mental illness lives all around us every day. I’ve seen it in other family members, I’ve seen it in friends, and I’ve dealt with it myself with my own postpartum depression.” – Rachel Hollis
7. “Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.” – Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
8. “There were days when she was unhappy. She did not know why – when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.” – Kate Chopin
9. “Sometimes, I just think depression’s one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there’s so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.” – Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
Depression quotes about love
1. “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
2. “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, Prozac Nation
3. “Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty. I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.” –Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
4. “Promise me you’ll always remember – you’re braver than you believe and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – Christopher Robin
5. “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, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
6. “If we start being honest about our pain, our anger, and our shortcomings instead of pretending they don’t exist, then maybe we’ll leave the world a better place than we found it.” – Russell Wilson
Sad depression quotes
Here are some sad anxiety and depression quotes that may not improve your mood but will make you feel understood.
1. “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
2. “It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint – it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.” – Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
3. “Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.” – Dick Cavett
4. “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, The Bean Trees
5. “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. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” – David Foster Wallace
6. “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, Prozac Nation
7. “I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire Cat, someday I will suddenly leave. But the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you; I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible…” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
8. “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. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try. But you know, and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding, and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re ’not at all like yourself but will be soon,’ but you know you won’t.” – Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
9. “Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.” – John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
10. “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.” – Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
11. “The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see – the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, 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. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.” – Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
12. “Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced… It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts, but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.” – J.K. Rowling
13. “’It doesn’t get better,’ I said. ‘The pain. The wounds scab over, and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you’ll never be the same.’” – Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
14. “This story [The Depressed Person] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It’s about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story. I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it’s such a self-centered illness – Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his Notes from the Underground. The depression is painful. You’re sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.” – David Foster Wallace
15. “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, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
16. “A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self – a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn’t shake off a sense of melodrama – a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Conclusion
We sometimes feel low, and that’s perfectly normal. However, you shouldn’t allow that feeling to stay for too long.
Depression is a serious matter, and I admire the bravery of all the people who managed to overcome it.
I hope these deep depression quotes helped you feel understood, and I truly hope that it succeeded in brightening up your mood at least a little bit.
The bottom line is that you always have to think positively, even when going through the most difficult time in your life.
Always end the day with a positive thought, hope that things will become better, and trust me, eventually, they will.