Depressive Thinking Quotes & Sayings

I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I always tell people that a revolution is not an event, it's a process. It is a struggle. And it doesn't usually go smoothly. — Bassem Youssef

Now add in deaths from old age and disease and expand that to a global scale. Please imagine the sanitary conditions in those underdeveloped regions of the raging tropics and subtropics, and those places where there are neither medical facilities nor doctors. In advanced countries, heart disease resulting from intemperate living and cancer due to air pollution are deadly new epidemics caused by the advance of civilization. Every year, about eight hundred thousand of Japan's one hundred million people will die - a number rivaling that of the total population of its outlying cities and towns. Fifty million people will die worldwide, out of a global population of three billion - a number about equal to the population of England. That's what life is like for the human race. — Sakyo Komatsu

Work ethic and this determination is all part of escaping the depressive side. Of course I'm manic depressive, maybe not to the degree that Exley was, but I think all writers are. There are highs and lows. Look at David Foster Wallace. — T.C. Boyle

Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God. — Frances Xavier Cabrini

Men are trouble"
"Amen to that." Peach said.
"You were happily married for fifty years," Miz June said, "I don't understand why you are agreeing."
"He Left Me." Peach said
"He DIED."
"Same thing. — Deb Caletti

Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration and that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and you are the imagination of yourself. Here's Tom with the weather ... ! — Bill Hicks

[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. — Aldous Huxley

I think if you're in this business, like any high-stakes business, the highs and lows can make you a manic-depressive person, if you weren't that way to start with. 'Cause it's just so crazy on your psyche. A lot of it has to do with people thinking they're greater than someone else. — Joan Cusack

The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred "No" even to duty
for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within. — Steven Pressfield

There is nothing so seductive to a girl as to be loved by a poetic-depressive type. And if she is vain enough to deceive herself into thinking that she loves him faithfully by clinging to him instead of giving him up, then her task will be easy. She will enjoy both the distinction and the good conscience of being faithful, and at the same time the most finely distilled romantic love. God save everyone from such faithfulness! — Soren Kierkegaard

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no ... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated ... — Kay Redfield Jamison

You can't fix this,' she ground out.
'That is not true. There is nothing anyone could hold over you that could not be overcome.'
'By what?' she demanded. 'Rainbows and sprites and the everlasting good wishes of your family? It won't work, Gregory. It won't. The Bridgertons may be powerful, but you cannot change the past, and you cannot bend the future to suit your whims ... You don't understand. You can't possibly. You are all so happy, so perfect.'
'We are not.'
'You are. You don't even know that you are, and you can't conceive that the rest of us are not, that we might struggle and try and be good and still not receive what we wish for. — Julia Quinn

I don't think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations. — Kim Ki-duk

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists. — Kay Redfield Jamison

These include Philip Marshall Dale, Medical Biographies: The Ailments of Thirty-Three Famous Persons (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952); Brian Dillon, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); Douglas Goldman et al., Retrospective Diagnoses of Historical Personalities as Viewed by Leading Contemporary Psychiatrists (Bloomfield, NJ: Schering Corporation, 1958); Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Kottler, Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Philip Mackowiak, Post-Mortem: Solving History's Great Medical Mysteries (Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 2007); Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Rettew, Child Temperament: New Thinking About the Boundary Between Traits and Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). Articles — Claudia Kalb

Moods are by nature compelling, contagious, and profoundly interpersonal, and disorders of mood alter the perceptions and behaviors not only of those who have them but also of those who are related or closely associated. Manic-depressive illness - marked as it is by extraordinary and confusing fluctuations in mood, personality, thinking, and behavior - inevitably has powerful and often painful effects on relationships. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I'm very proud that the first bill I had the opportunity to sign into law as President was the Family and Medical Leave Act No parent should ever have to choose between work and family; between earning a decent wage and caring for a child. — William J. Clinton

Stop thinking. I've stopped some 15 years ago. Otherwise, if you will be thinking you won't want to live. Everyone who thinks is unhappy. — Sergei Dovlatov

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case. — Martin Caidin

Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings. — Edward W. Said