Depression Quotations

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.

There is no fulfillment in things whatsoever. And I think one of the reasons that depression reigns supreme amongst the rich and famous is some of them thought that maybe those things would bring them happiness. But what, in fact, does is having a cause, having a passion. And that's really what gives life's true meaning.

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.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

We live in a society bloated with data yet starved for wisdom. We're connected 24/7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high. We must course-correct.

I have a master's in psychology, and depression and anxiety are considered to be cyclical.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable 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?

Until you've had depression I don't think you're qualified to talk about it.

Recovering from the suicide of a loved one, you need all the help you can get, so I very much recommend a meditation program. The whole picture of how to recover from this has to do with body, mind, and spirit. That's applicable to any kind of depression.

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.

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

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.

Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left.

When I was in high school, I used to have breakfast with my grandpa every morning. He instilled a lot of values in me: hard work, loyalty. He grew up during the Great Depression in Philly in poverty - he didn't have enough to eat as a kid. Sometimes his family would get kicked out of their apartment because they couldn't pay the rent.

When my marriage broke up... I had just put on 45 pounds for my 'Shall We Dance?' character. I had to eat 10,000 calories a day just to put on weight while training with Tony Dovolani. I basically stayed in bed for a six-month rotation of depression naps. Dance helped me lose the weight.

The values transmitted through oral history are many - courage, selflessness, the ability to endure, and to do so with humor and grace. I got those values listening to my dad's stories about the Depression and how their family survived. It gave me courage that I, too, could survive hard times.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

I've had this problem since I was in my 20s. They don't call it manic depression anymore. They call it a bipolar disorder, and I'm a Type 2?

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression.

I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.

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.

The years of the economic depression have been years of political reaction, and that is why the economic crisis has generated a world peace crisis.

For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful.

Depression is something that makes you lose your sight.

Well over fifty years ago I was making radio loudspeakers and radio sets in Rochester, New York; pretty young and inexperienced; but we survived the depression.

Just like other illnesses, depression can be treated so that people can live happy, active lives.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

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.

I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.

I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.

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.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

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.

My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience.

Spreading the word about depression is my mission. I am working to build awareness, educate people about the symptoms, and change public opinion and individual attitudes about depression.

But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.

My own image of my work is that I no sooner settle into something than a break occurs. These breaks are always painful and depressing but despite them I see that there's a consistency that holds out, but is hard to define.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

I can certainly see how people are overcome by depression.

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

You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.

My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

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.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others.

I can't help but recall my dad and mom. Depression era kids, 8th and 9th grade educations, clawed and scratched to make a living as dairy farmers their whole life. At least two drought cycles nearly took it all away. They just worked harder, longer... and they made it.

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Depression, as far as I'm concerned, is just a waste of time.

Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

All the adversity I've had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me... You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

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.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

I don't care if they eat me alive, I've got better things to do then survive.

My depression at the end of Wham! was because I was beginning to realise I was gay, not bi.

Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.

You know, you become crazy. I had done a story for '60 Minutes' on depression previously, but I had no idea that I was now experiencing it. Finally, I collapsed and just went to bed.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.

Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.

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.

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.

One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness.

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

If someone decides they're not going to be happy, it's not your problem. You don't have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence - as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be even lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anybody or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

I think Wilco is going to definitely stand the test of time - no question - and Uncle Tupleo, and the whole No Depression scene, which is now alt-country. I think that's going to be around a long time.

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

If I didn't try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.