Top 100 Depressing Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Also featured in: Life Philosophy Quotes, Philosophical Quotes, Struggle Quotes

2. “I used to think the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”

— Robin Williams

Also featured in: Relationship Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Quotes About People

3. “I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Giving Up Quotes, Sad Quotes, Loss Quotes, Depression Quotes

4. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Also featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Philosophical Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Sorrow Quotes

5. “If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Also featured in: Interesting Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

6. “We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Depression Quotes

7. “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

— William Shakespeare

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Deep Quotes, Life Is Short Quotes

8. “We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Suffering Quotes, Pain Quotes, Hurt Quotes

9. “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Suffering Quotes

10. “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Also featured in: Philosophical Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Pain Quotes

11. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Philosophical Quotes, Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

12. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Mental Health Quotes, Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Quotes About Feelings

13. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Not Giving Up Quotes, Moving Quotes

14. “Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Depression Quotes

15. “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Suffering Quotes

16. “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, Everybody knows that the war is over, Everybody knows the good guys lost.”

— Leonard Cohen

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Quotes About War

17. “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Suffering Quotes, Depression Quotes

18. “I wake up in the morning and ask myself; is life worth living? Should I blast myself?”

— Tupac Shakur

Also featured in: Depression Quotes, Hurt Quotes

19. “Deep in earth my love is lying And I must weep alone.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Love Is Quotes, Depression Quotes, Broken Heart Quotes

20. “It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Also featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Suffering Quotes, Demotivational Quotes

21. “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.”

— Elon Musk

Also featured in: Inspirational Entrepreneurship Quotes, Obstacles Quotes, Challenges Quotes

22. “No one here gets out alive.”

— Jim Morrison

Also featured in: Music Quotes, Short Quotes About Life, Hard Hitting Quotes

23. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Crazy Quotes, Clever Quotes

24. “Is there no way out of the mind?”

— Sylvia Plath

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life

25. “Humans are stupid. I’m ashamed to be human.”

— Kurt Cobain

Also featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes

26. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

— Sylvia Plath

Also featured in: Deep Quotes

27. “If we don’t end war, war will end us.”

— H. G. Wells

Also featured in: Peace Quotes, Quotes About War

28. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Quotes About Writing, Struggle Quotes

29. “If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.”

— Pablo Neruda

Also featured in: Love You Quotes, Love Hurts Quotes

30. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

— George Orwell

Also featured in: Freedom Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Government Quotes

31. “This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Fight Club Quotes

32. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”

— Dante Alighieri

33. “Art never comes from happiness.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Art Quotes

34. “This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Life Is Short Quotes, Fight Club Quotes

35. “That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

— George Carlin

Also featured in: Funny Quotes, Sarcastic Quotes, Witty Quotes

36. “A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Book Quotes

37. “Each man has a breaking point, no matter how strong his spirit. Somewhere, deep inside him, there is a flaw that only the fickle cruelty of fate can find.”

— David Gemmell

Also featured in: Strong Quotes

38. “Every corpse on Mount Everest was once an extremely motivated person.”

— Anonymous

Also featured in: Sarcastic Quotes, Demotivational Quotes

39. “When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Suffering Quotes, Soul Quotes

40. “Despair is suffering without meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Also featured in: Meaning Quotes, Mental Health Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes, Suffering Quotes

41. “If you let them kill you, they will.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes

42. “To live without Hope is to Cease to live.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Also featured in: Never Give Up Quotes, Meaning Quotes, Not Giving Up Quotes, Quotes About Hope

43. “You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?”

— Seneca the Younger

Also featured in: Meaning Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Existentialism Quotes

44. “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

— Tom Waits

Also featured in: Music Quotes, Sorrow Quotes

45. “April is the cruellest month.”

— T. S. Eliot

46. “I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.”

— Robert Browning

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Not Giving Up Quotes, Loneliness Quotes

47. “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

— Sylvia Plath

Also featured in: Mental Health Quotes

48. “I feel much better, now that I’ve given up hope.”

— Ashleigh Brilliant

Also featured in: Silly Quotes, Giving Up Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Demotivational Quotes

49. “Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Fight Club Quotes, Darkness Quotes

50. “To love is to destroy. To be loved is to be the destroyed.”

— Cassandra Clare

Also featured in: Love Hurts Quotes