Depression

Depression can refer to either a sad mood or a medical condition in which persistent sadness or misery has a major impact on one's ability to function.

Sourced

• … the best thing for being sad… is to learn something.
  • Merlin to Arthur in, The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White

• People here [in Congress] often think of depression as being sad; no matter what I tell other legislators, they don't know. They don't understand how it is emptiness, how it is a vast nothing.
  • U.S. Representative Lynn N. Rivers; quoted in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

• Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
  • Andrew Solomon, in The Noonday Demon

• That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
  • Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), American author. Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, September 13, 1929. Selected Letters, edited by Carlos Baker (1981)

• In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant.... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.
  • Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish existentialist philosopher. “Diapsalmata,” Vol. 1, Either/Or (1843, trans. 1987).

• The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.
  • Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), Canadian musician, poet, novelist. International Herald Tribune, 4th November 1988

• Depression is melancholy minus its charms—the animation, the fits.
  • Susan Sontag (1933–2004), American philosopher and essayist. Illness as Metaphor, ch. 7 (1978)

Unsourced

• Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
  • Steven Wright

• If you feel sad just feel your heart beat.
  • Swami Raj