“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation
Source: Prozac Nation
Depressing quotes page 2
“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”
Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle
Source: I Capture the Castle
P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author
Variant: He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.
Source: The Man Upstairs and Other Stories
Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist
Misattributed
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet
Hyperion http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5436, Bk. III, Ch. IV (1839). <br class="br">Variant: 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. <br class="br">Context: "Ah! this beautiful world!" said Flemming, with a smile. "Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and Heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly; and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. 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."
“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author
Diana Peterfreund (1979) American writer
Source: For Darkness Shows the Stars
Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic
William James, "Is Life Worth Living?," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).
Misattributed
“Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light.”
Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light
Source: A Ring of Endless Light (1980)
“Sometimes that's all you can do. Hope.”
Natasha Friend (1972) American writer
Source: My Life in Black and White
“Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression.”
Karen Horney (1885–1952) American-German psychoanalyst
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author
Source: Little Foxes (1865), Ch. 3.
Source: Little Foxes: Or, the Insignificant Little Habits Which Mar Domestic Happiness
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”
Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar
Source: The Bell Jar
Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host
As quoted in Visions : How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century (1999) by Michio Kaku, p. 295
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications
Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher
Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer
“Death comes for us all. We can only choose how to face it when it comes.”
Robert Jordan The Dragon Reborn
Aviendha
(15 October 1991)
Source: The Dragon Reborn
“To have felt too much is to end in feeling nothing.”
Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster
A comment regarding her divorce from Sinclair Lewis, quoted by Vincent Sheean in Dorothy and Red (1963)
“Either you will be you or you will not be at all.”
Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman
“The Knight,” p. 81
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “What After”
Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer
Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 13
Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Thoughts For All Ages http://pbskids.org/rogers/all_ages/thoughts1.htm
“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.”
Amit Ray (1960) Indian author
OM Chanting and Meditation (2010) http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/OM_Chanting_and_Meditation.html?id=3KKjPoFmf4YC,
“Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.”
Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
The Collected Works of Karen Horney (1957) by Karen Horney, p. 154: "We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression."
Misattributed
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities
Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.
Bk. II, Ch. 5; source: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 6 (Romane und Novellen I), dtv Verlag, München, 1982, p. 397 (II.5)
Elective Affinities (1809)
“Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
John Green book Looking for Alaska
Alaska Young, p. 44
Looking for Alaska (2005)
Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American pastor
Statement of 1937 or earlier, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited by Herbert Victor Prochnow
Context: Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world — making the most of one's best.
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"”
John Greenleaf Whittier Maud Muller
Bret Harte wrote a famous parody of this famous poem, "Mrs. Judge Jenkins" in which the Judge marries Maud, and which he ends with the lines:
Maud soon thought the Judge a bore,
With all his learning and all his lore;
And the Judge would have bartered Maud's fair face
For more refinement and social grace.
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn't ought to be".
Maud Muller (1856)
Context: Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
“But these are the people who never get it.”
Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) American actress
"I want everything" http://home.earthlink.net/~2lulah2/everything.htm in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108 <br class="br">Context: I don’t know what I want.<br>Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long. I mean, you don’t want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters.<br>Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there's a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don't know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life.<br>But these are the people who never get it.
“To be young is all there is in the world.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (21 March 1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 5
Context: To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
“And you do not think that this is possible?”
Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World
“I’ll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.”
Chapter 12 (p. 188)
Terminal World (2010)
“To be and not to be, that is the answer.”
Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet
This witticism derived from William Shakespeare's line "To be or not to be; that is the question" in Hamlet, has sometimes been attributed to Hein, but also to many others. The earliest occurrence so far located in research for Wikiquote was published in A Calendar of Doubts and Faiths (1930) by William Marias Malisoff.
Misattributed
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer
“Is the thought that shapes the world.”
Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer
Original: (it) È il pensiero a dare forma al mondo.
Source: prevale.net