105 Depression Quotes To Leave You a Bit More Hopeful

Depression is heavy — and the stigma surrounding it can add to the burden. Nearly 30% of all Americans have been formally diagnosed with depression (per a 2023 Gallup poll) — and 73% of Americans know someone with a mental health disorder (per a 2019 CBS News poll).

If you’re struggling with depression, please know that hope is real and healing is possible.

At Good Good Good, we take mental health seriously — celebrating mental health activists, advances in psychological support, opportunities for proactive self-care, and more conversations about mental health that help destigmatize mental illnesses.

Over the course of years, the Good Good Good team has slowly collected our favorite mental health-related quotes and today we’re sharing a curated list of depression-related quotes for the first time.

We hope these words from thoughtful experts, allies, and people who have dealt with depression will leave you feeling less alone. Dive into these quotes about depression:

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Please know that asking for help is a sign of strength — not weakness. If you’re in a crisis, please dial 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If you’re looking for professional help or looking for specific support, we encourage you to use Good Good Good’s Mental Health Resources Guide. You can also text HOME to 741-741 to instantly connect with a trained crisis counselor, 24/7, for free.

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The Best Quotes About Depression

Famous Quotes

“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.”
— John Green

“Depression is being colorblind and constantly told how colorful the world is.”
— Atticus, Lvoe.: Poems, Epigrams & Aphorisms

“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

“The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it.”
— Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse.”
— Andrew Solomon, in his TED Talk, Depression, The Secret We Share

“If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
— Fred Rogers

“If you are uncomfortable — in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused — you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right.”
— Glennon Doyle

“My depression isn’t something that I suffer from, but it’s not something that I’m cured of. It’s just a thing I have to manage. And so the more I learn about it, the more I learn about myself, the more I learn about my traumas and triggers, the better I am at being proactive and heading it off before it can, you know, cause a lot of damage.”
— John Moe, in a podcast

“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Every one of your weaknesses exists for a reason — and, more importantly, they don’t actually mean you are weak. To think of your self-doubt, of your depression, or your inexperience as weakness is to misunderstand them entirely. All those things will contain an important message for you, if you look at them from the right angle.”
— Lee Crutchley, Nobody Knows What They’re Doing

“What I thought would kill me, didn’t. Every time I said to myself: I can’t take this anymore — I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all — and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life.”
— Glennon Doyle

“Mental health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but, importantly, you are not the rain.”
— Matt Haig

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Motivational Quotes

“Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
— Vincent van Gogh

“I am learning every day to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be to inspire me and not terrify me.”
— Tracee Ellis Ross

“I want to share all this in one place because if we talk, things get better, and more people we love might stick around so we can love them more.”
— John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“So we need to stop the ignorance, stop the intolerance, stop the stigma, and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth, and start talking, because the only way we’re going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together, by standing strong together. And I believe that we can.”
— Kevin Breel, in his TED Talk, Confessions of a Depressed Comic

“It’s your outlook on life that counts. If you take yourself lightly and don’t take yourself too seriously, pretty soon you can find the humor in our everyday lives. And sometimes it can be a lifesaver.”
— Betty White

“While it’s true you don’t have all the time in the world, you do have all your time in the world. You have literally your entire life to live with yourself, to adapt, and to accomplish goals.”
— Adam J. Kurtz, You Are Here (For Now): A Guide to Finding Your Way

“The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.”
— Glennon Doyle

“Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.”
— Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“As long as you as an individual... can convince yourself that in order to move forward as best you can you have to be optimistic, you can be described as ‘one of the faithful,’ one of those people who can say, ‘Well, look, something’s going to happen! Let’s just keep trying. Let’s not give up.’”
— Tom Hanks

“Perhaps you have to have a little bit of hope to believe that beauty can be found, to believe that life does come back, that something can surprise you. And maybe hope and wonder are somehow related. Maybe wonder feeds hope and hope feeds wonder. You see something beautiful and it reminds you that it’s possible to see something beautiful.”
— Jamie Tworkowski, If You Feel Too Much

“Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative you can get beyond your pain or negativity.”
— Yoko Ono

“So, instead of looking for hope, try this:
Don’t hope.
Don’t despair, either.
In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place.
Don’t hope for better. Just be better.
Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined…
Be a better human.”
— Mark Manson, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life. I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. These small actions help remind me that there are so many great, glorious pieces of good in the world.”
— Dolly Parton, Dream More

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Celebrities Talking About Depression

“Every struggle in your life has shaped you into the person you are today. Be thankful for the hard times, they can only make you stronger.”
— Keanu Reeves

“Keep yourself busy if you want to avoid depression. For me, inactivity is the enemy.”
— Matt Lucas

“I understand your pain. Trust me, I do. I’ve seen people go from the darkest moments in their lives to living a happy, fulfilling life. You can do it too. I believe in you. You are not a burden. You will never be a burden.”
— Sophie Turner

“You can turn your life around. You can go through hell and back. It is possible. Never underestimate yourself. I believe in you.”
— Demi Lovato

“I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital... I outlasted my problems. I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on.”
— Carrie Fisher

“I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless, and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.”
— Robin Williams

“I found that with depression, one of the most important things you can realize is that you’re not alone. You’re not the first to go through it, you’re not gonna be the last to go through it.”
— Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

“If you know someone who’s depressed please resolve to never ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. 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

“If you have been brutally broken but still have the courage to be gentle to other living beings, then you’re a badass with a heart of an angel.”
— Keanu Reeves

“I had everything I needed to be happy. And yet, for much of the last year, I felt unhappy. I started taking an antidepressant, which helped and I started sharing the news with friends and family — I felt like everyone deserved an explanation, and I didn’t know how else to say it other than the only way I know: just saying it. It got easier and easier to say it aloud every time.”
— Chrissy Teigen

“In some of the darkest and hardest moments, there is always a part of me that is okay. And I can always access that part of me.”
— Tracee Ellis Ross

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About Fighting and Overcoming Depression

“One foot, then the other. Don’t look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more. Eventually you’ll make it to the shower. And you’ll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step.”
— Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“We’re all in this together. It’s okay to be honest. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to say you’re stuck, or that you’re haunted or that you can’t begin to let go. We can all relate to those things. Screw the stigma that says otherwise. Break the silence and break the cycle, for you are more than just your pain. You are not alone. And people need other people.”
— Jamie Tworkowski, If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For

“Part of what makes things better in time is that you yourself get better. You grow into your own. You hone your skills. You learn to embrace who you are and find strength in that identity.”
— Adam J. Kurtz, You Are Here (For Now)

“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

“Learning to identify the cyclical nature of the depression loop and to recognize your own depression cues… is crucial for uncovering happiness… because knowing what triggers your own depression loop is a powerful first step toward being able to overcome depression. Having awareness gives you space to make choices.”
— Elisha Goldstein, Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
— Alice Walker, Living by the Word

“How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience? And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, and say, ‘I was depressed a long time ago, I never want to think about it again, I’m not going to look at it and I’m just going to get on with my life,’ ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience.”
— Andrew Solomon, in his TED Talk

“There will be a lot of adapting. There will be a lot of letting go. It is scary but necessary work to make, do, and make do in the service of becoming a version of yourself you can feel content living with. Release the baggage, your scars will be reminder enough of the lessons learned in the process.”

— Adam J. Kurtz, You Are Here (For Now): A Guide to Finding Your Way

“When I think of the return after the journey through and beyond depression, I remember stories from around the world in which the hero sets off to find the priceless jewel or the peerless bride. He travels long and far, overcoming countless obstacles, only to return home to discover that the jewel was sitting on his windowsill, that the ideal bride all along had lived next door. The scene of our lives may or may not be different, but, as we come to the close of this part of our journey, we have new eyes with which to see it.”
— James S. Gordon, Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out Of Depression

“We have to fight to not get lost in our own pain. We have to fight to remember the good, the thing we love around us, the things that we are thankful for. Don’t buy the lie that your story is just a tragedy. And don’t buy the lie that you are the only character in your story.”
— Jamie Tworkowski

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Self Care Quotes

“When I loved myself enough, I began leaving whatever wasn’t healthy. This meant people, jobs, my own beliefs, and habits — anything that kept me small. My judgement called it disloyal. Now I see it as self-loving.”
— Kim McMillen

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
— Buddha

“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”
— Jean Shinoda Bolen

“When you feel like you can’t fight anymore — don’t give up. Just take some time to rest.”
— TWLOHA

“Don’t take your health for granted. Don’t take your body for granted. Do something today that communicates to your body that you desire to care for it. Tomorrow is not promised.”
— Jada Pinkett Smith

“You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”
— Brené Brown

“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.”
— Audre Lorde

“Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine.”
— Charlotte Eriksson

“But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself — to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”
— Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“Trauma comes to all of us, and its consequences can be terrible. The good news is that all of us can use tools of self-awareness and self-care to heal our trauma and, indeed, to become healthier and more whole than we’ve ever been.”
— James S. Gordon, Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing

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→ Read more quotes about self care

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Helping Others with Depression Quotes

“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

“More than anything, my wish for you is this: That when your awful darkest days come, you will know you’re not alone. Pain will tell you to keep quiet, but that’s a lie. Life is fragile and we all break in different ways. I hope you know you can be honest. I hope you know that you can ask for help. Did you catch that? It is absolutely positively okay to ask for help. It simply means you’re human. Help is real and it is possible; people find it every day.”
— Jamie Tworkowski, If You Feel Too Much

“I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, ‘What should I do?’ And I say: ‘Act. Do something.’ Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.”
— Greta Thunberg

“Hope is a funny thing because in a way it’s everywhere. Like, people will say ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘It will all work out in the end’ — which are very hopeful sentiments — it’s just that they’re also, you know, b*llsh*t. And for me anyway, they just don’t hold up in the face of real suffering. But I’ll tell you what does hold up for me. There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that starts out, ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul — And sings the tune without the words — And never stops — at all.’
And you’ll notice that Emily Dickinson doesn’t say that one never stops hearing the song of hope — only that it doesn’t stop playing.
I’m really sorry that you’re in so much pain, and your pain is real, but the song of hope is still singing. And I know you can’t hear it, but someday soon you will.”
— John Green

“The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.”
— The Dalai Lama

“For saddies, encouragement is revelatory. Rather than making their resolve stronger, it will implant a resolve where none had been. ‘Because this person believes in me,’ the saddie thinks, ‘and this person is not me, they may have a point.’”
— John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“On July 4, 2013, my world came crashing in on me. That was the day I got a phone call from my mom telling me that my 22-year-old nephew, Paul, had ended his life, after years of battling depression and anxiety. There are no words that can describe the devastation I felt. Paul and I were very close, but I had no idea he was in so much pain. Neither one of us had ever talked to the other about our struggles. The shame and stigma kept us both silent. Now, my way of dealing with adversity is to face it head on…”
— Nikki Webber Allen, in her TED Talk

“One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change. Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational — which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themselves? Even if they decide to do things differently, won’t the rest of the world still be the same? It’s a reasonable argument. But that’s not how life generally works. Remember Sartre’s famous line ‘Hell is other people’? It’s true — the world is filled with difficult people (or, as John would have it, ‘idiots’). I’ll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now — some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn’t share your last name. But sometimes — more often than we tend to realize — those difficult people are us. That’s right — sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.”
— Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“You will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”
— Jamie Tworkowski, If You Feel Too Much

“People who are hurting don’t need avoiders, protectors, or fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpful vigil to our pain.”
— Glennon Doyle

“These days, I share my story openly, and I ask others to share theirs, too. I believe that’s what it takes to help people who may be suffering in silence to know that they are not alone and to know that with help, they can heal.”
— Nikki Webber Allen, Don’t suffer from your depression in silence

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Depression Awareness

“Yes, there is discrimination against people with mental illness and, yes, it can be a scary thing to talk about. But the hunger to do so is there, and by being open yourself you can get that conversation out on the dance floor.”
— John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“Real depression isn’t being sad when something in your life goes wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right. That’s real depression, and that’s what I suffer from. And to be totally honest, that’s hard for me to stand up here and say. It’s hard for me to talk about, and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about, so much so that no one’s talking about it. And no one’s talking about depression, but we need to be, because right now it’s a massive problem. But we don’t see it on social media, right?… And so because we don’t see it, we don’t see the severity of it. But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this: every 30 seconds, every 30 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because of depression, and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away, it might be two continents away, but it’s happening, and it’s happening every single day.”
— Kevin Breel, in his TED Talk, Confessions of a Depressed Comic

“But my point is, if we don’t talk about this stuff, and we don’t learn how to deal with our lives, it’s not going to be one in four. It’s going to be four in four who are really, really going to get ill in the upstairs department. And while we’re at it, can we please stop the stigma?”
— Ruby Wax, in her TED Talk, What’s so Funny About Mental Illness?

“It’s time for all of us — physicians, therapists, and patients — to bring these dark flashes of despair, these terrible preoccupations with death, out of the closet of fear and shame and into the open space of shared discussion.”
— James S. Gordon, Unstuck

“We need to speak up and shatter the silence. We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in, because if there’s one thing that I’ve come to realize if there’s one thing that I see as the biggest problem, it’s not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others. It’s in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves, where we’re okay with who we are because when we get honest, we see that we all struggle and we all suffer.”
— Kevin Breel, in his TED Talk, Confessions of a Depressed Comic

“When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalize everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.”
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

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Short Quotes

“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
— William James

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
— Helen Keller

“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.”
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.”
— Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.”
— Brené Brown

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”
— Jack Kornfield

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
— Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

“I bear the dungeon within me; within me is winter, ice, and despair; I have darkness in my soul.”
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.”
— Mark Manson

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Funny Quotes

“I just give myself permission to suck… I find this hugely liberating.”
— John Green

“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”
— Margaret Chittenden

“But people who are depressed will also say, ‘No matter what we do, we’re all just going to die in the end.’ Or they’ll say, ‘There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body.’ To which you have to say, ‘That’s true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast.’”
— Andrew Solomon, in his TED Talk, Depression, The Secret We Share

“‘You’re overthinking it.’ I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
— Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Finding a therapist is a bit like dating. You might have to have some very boring or weird or tense meetings before you find someone you connect with.”
— John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
— Charles M. Shultz

“I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
— Edgar Allen Poe

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More Quotes

“The beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.”
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive. The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy. The failures in business are what lead to a better understanding of what’s necessary to be successful.”
— Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

“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

“Whether an illness affects your heart, your arm, or your brain, it’s still an illness, and there shouldn’t be any distinction. We would never tell someone with a broken leg that they should stop wallowing and get it together. We don’t consider taking medication for an ear infection something to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t treat mental health conditions any differently. Instead, we should make it clear that getting help isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s a sign of strength — and we should ensure that people can get the treatment they need.”
— Michelle Obama

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teachings and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.”
— Charles Dickens

“And what you really fear the most isn’t the suffering inside of you. It’s the stigma inside of others, it’s the shame, it’s the embarrassment, it’s the disapproving look on a friend’s face, it’s the whispers in the hallway that you’re weak, it’s the comments that you’re crazy. That’s what keeps you from getting help. That’s what makes you hold it in and hide it. It’s the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you hide it.”
— Kevin Breel, in his TED Talk, Confessions of a Depressed Comic

“And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it’s ridiculous. You know it’s ridiculous while you’re experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it’s not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it.”
— Andrew Solomon, in his TED Talk, Depression, The Secret We Share

“I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.”
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say, “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

“The body might be expending very little actual energy, but the mind is running a marathon combined with an obstacle course. Are you depressed and find yourself tired all the time? That may be because you do a decathlon every day.”
— John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“If at first you don’t succeed, congratulations welcome to life it is hard sometimes but also mostly okay.”
— Adam J. Kurtz, You Are Here (For Now): A Guide to Finding Your Way

“Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it.”
— Mark Manson

“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but — if that is the metaphor — you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“If more people understand the reality of mental illness and get disabused of the Hollywood myths about it, the stigma about getting help will diminish, and then we’ll live in a healthier society.”
— John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression