4,044 Quotes About Depression

If I can draw the slightest smile across a single face obliterated by pain, in that act I will have begun to understand the power of an ordinary human being to perform the seemingly impossible in the life of another human being. And how can that experience do anything less than drive me to try and make the world smile.

If you feel anxiety or depression, you are not in the present. You are either anxiously projecting the future or depressed and stuck in the past. The only thing you have any control over is the present moment; simple breathing exercises can make us calm and present instantly.

Take each day in your open palms and close your fists around it. This life is not done with you yet.

I believe in not trying to control things that are out of my control or none of my business.

If ever I was running, it was towards you.

I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.

I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I realize the inconvenient, inappropriate truth: ‘I love this man… and it has swallowed me.

(Ramana Maharshi's advice on depression) This depression must be traced to its origin. The origin is the wrong identification of the body with the Self. The disease is not of the Self. It is of the body. But the body does not come and tell you that it is possessed by the disease. It is you who say so. Why? Because you have wrongly identified yourself with the body. The body itself is a thought. Be as you really are. There is no reason to be depressed. (p. 360)

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.