89 Uplifting Suicide Prevention Quotes

In times of darkness, words can offer a glimmer of hope, providing the strength and reassurance needed to persevere. We have carefully curated a collection of the top 89 uplifting suicide prevention quotes to serve as a comforting reminder that you are not alone. These quotes, from renowned authors, compassionate mental health advocates, and individuals who have found their way through difficult times, aim to inspire, uplift, and remind us all of the inherent value of life. Whether you are seeking solace for yourself or looking to support someone you care about, these words can be a powerful tool in fostering resilience and hope.

1. “If wild my breast and sore my pride,I bask in dreams of suicide,If cool my heart and high my headI think 'How lucky are the dead.” - Dorothy Parker

2. “Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!” - Bill Maher

3. “and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.” - Jodi Picoult

4. “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

5. “It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.” - Vincent Willem van Gogh

6. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

7. “To be or not to be. That's not really a question.” - Jean-Luc Godard

8. “RésuméRazors pain you,Rivers are damp,Acids stain you,And drugs cause cramp.Guns aren't lawful,Nooses give,Gas smells awful.You might as well live.” - Dorothy Parker

9. “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” - Nietzsche

10. “The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.” - Courtney Love

11. “Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.” - J.M. Coetzee

12. “Sons of suicides seldom do well.” - Kurt Vonnegut

13. “In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.” - Orson Scott Card

14. “Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.” - André Breton

15. “The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

16. “We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. ” - Jeffrey Eugenides

17. “He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving. ” - J.D. Salinger

18. “The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.” - Walker Percy

19. “But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.” - Anne Sexton

20. “The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.” - G.K. Chesterton

21. “Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?” - Christopher Hitchens

22. “No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.” - David Hume

23. “There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.” - Betrand Russell

24. “Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.” - Robert E. Neale

25. “My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.” - Nina LaCour

26. “My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.” - Nina LaCour

27. “When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.” - Marilyn Monroe

28. “I don't-" I shake my head. (...) "What? What were you going to say?" This is another trick of shrinks. They never let you stop in midthought. If you open your mouth, they want to know exactly what you had the intention of saying.” - Ned Vizzini

29. “After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant.” - Julian Barnes

30. “All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why -- I don't know.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

31. “I could never kill myself. I approve of suicide if you have horrible health. Otherwise it's the ultimate hissy fit.” - John Waters

32. “Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.” - Phoebe Stone

33. “I'd spend about an hour, my room darkening around me, wondering what the hell happened to make me so unsure of who I even was. Because who you are is supposed to be the easiest question in the world to answer, right? Only for me it hadn't been easy for a very long time.” - Jennifer Brown

34. “Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and she hallucinated that she was a great land tortoise lying on its back in the hot and humid hold of a sailing ship of long ago. She pawed the air in perfect futility, just as a land tortoise on its back would have done.As she had often told her students, sailing ships bound out across the Pacific used to stop off in the Galàpagos Islands to capture defenseless tortoises, who could live on their backs without food or water for months. They were so slow and tame and huge and plentiful. The sailors would capsize them without fear of being bitten or clawed. then they would drag them down to waiting longboats on the shore, using the animals' own useless suits of armor for sleds.They would store them on their backs in the dark paying no further attention to them until it was time for them to be eaten. the beauty of the tortoises to the sailors was that they were fresh meat which did not have to be refrigerated or eaten right away.” - Kurt Vonnegut

35. “I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.” - Julian Barnes

36. “And I want to tell you about everything but I can't because I couldn't stand for you to have that look on your face all the time. I just need you to look at me and think that I'm normal. I just really need that from you.” - Nina LaCour

37. “You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.” - Nina LaCour

38. “If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.” - Clifford Odets

39. “You and your scars. Please! You don't kill youself like this!" I gesture, holding a wrist turned up to the ceiling, then pretending to cut across it with my other hand. "That's just a cry for help. That's just attention. Everbody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital. That's just from movies and TV shows and stuff like that. You didn't really try to kill yourself. you just wanted attention, but you screwed up. Try harder next time.” - Barry Lyga

40. “In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.” - Heinrich von Kleist

41. “Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.” - Anne Stevenson

42. “The fog is clearing; life is a matter of taste.” - Frank Wedekind

43. “I've been asked by lots of people, "What happens if you do kill yourself?" They want to know about what it would be like for other people around you, like the person who would find your body, the other kids at school, whoever would have to clean up the blood, what your family holidays would be like.” - Albert Borris

44. “When you attempt suicide, the counselors try to talk you out of trying it again by asking you about other people, which is good prevention if you care about other people.” - Albert Borris

45. “There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.” - Nick Hornby

46. “Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.” - Martin Amis

47. “Anyone can be crazy. That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?” - Michael Thomas Ford

48. “That sounds weird: "kill yourself." It makes it sound like you tried to murder someone, only that someone is you.” - Michael Thomas Ford

49. “Vivre, naturellement, n'est jamais facile. On continue à faire les gestes que l'existence commande, pour beaucoup de raisons dont la première est l'habitude. Mourir volontairement suppose qu'on a reconnu, même instinctivement, le caractère dérisoire de cette habitude, l'absence de toute raison profonde de vivre, le caractère insensé de cette agitation quotidienne et l'inutilité de la souffrance.” - Albert Camus

50. “Le suicide est une solution à l'absurde.” - Albert Camus

51. “Women, can't live with them, can't murder/suicide without them” - Josh Stern

52. “I often think of death. True. Suicide is a reasonable option. True. My sins are unpardonable.I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I leave it blank.” - james frey

53. “If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.” - Emma Forrest

54. “I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.” - Antonin Artaud

55. “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.” - Sigmund Freud

56. “We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

57. “But if someone had slowed him down, just slightly interrupted his course, maybe he could have gotten through that one nightmarish moment; maybe he would never get that close to it again.” - Frederick Barthelme

58. “And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern:“they almost always have crystals in their heart.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

59. “The most incredible architectureIs the architecture of Self,which is ever changing, evolving, revolving and has unlimited beauty and light inside which radiates outwards for everyone to see and feel. With every in breatheyou are adding to your lifeand every out breathe you are releasing what is not contributing to your life.Every breathe is a re-birth.” - Allan Rufus

60. “Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.” - Emile Durkheim

61. “It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true—unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.” - Martin Amis

62. “Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.” - Vladimir Nabokov

63. “To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.” - Jill Bialosky

64. “There were worse things than death.There would be a leap and a moment suspended, then a long hopeless curve to the rocks and river below. They would fall like leaves between clouds of swifts and then be washed away by the thundering rapids. Bramble clung to that thought. If their bodies washed away then there could be no identification, no danger of reprisals on her family. She hung on tighter.The roan's hindquarters bunched under her and they were in the air. It was like she had imagined: the leap, and then the moment suspended in air that seemed to last forever.Below her the swifts boiled up through the river mist, swerving and swooping, while she and the roan seemed to stay frozen above them. Bramble felt, like a rush of air, the presence of the gods surround her. The shock made her lose her balance and begin to slide sideways.She felt herself falling. With an impossible flick of both legs, the roan shrugged her back onto his shoulders. Then the long curve downward and she braced herself to see the cliffs rushing past as they fell.Time to die.Instead she felt a thumping jolt that flung her from the roan's back and tossed her among the rocks at the cliff's edge on the other side.On the other side.Her sight cleared, although the light still seemed dim. Her hearing came back a little. On the other side of the abyss a jumble of men and hounds were milling, shouting, astonished and very angry. "You can't do that!" one yelled. "It's impossible!""Well, he shagging did it!" another said. "Can't be impossible!""Head for the bridge!" Beck shouted. "We can still get him! I want that horse!” - Pamela Freeman

65. “J_Doe032692 wrote: I am not a thin person. However this does not give people the right to taunt me, calling me ugly and worthless, telling me to kill myself because no one will ever want me, or to make up songs about why I am so fat and how much food I eat. NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO HURT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING THIS BADLY.My throat constricts. The neck brace feels as if it's shrinking and cutting off my esophagus. I reach up and cover the words with my hand and the web site dissolves.I want to go. Now.” - Julie Anne Peters

66. “The world is full of 'friends' of suicide victims thinking 'if I had only made that drive over there, I could have done something.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

67. “Nafasi yako peponi itapotea iwapo utamruhusu Pluto (kiongozi wa ahera) akukaribishe bazarai (makao makuu ya ahera) kwa kuchukua maisha yako mwenyewe. Kujiua ni kujipenda zaidi kuliko unaowapenda. Anayejiua hujifikiria zaidi yeye kuliko wengine.” - Enock Maregesi

68. “She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.” - Jodi Picoult

69. “I have always felt that suicide was connected to communication. Not due to a lack of opportunity, but to an impossibility to communicate and be understood. It can be frustrating to try to share something with somebody, something important and real to you, and see in the face of another person that he doesn't care or, worse still, simply doesn't understand you. Of course, it is inevitable that this will happen from time to time, but imagine if it were always that way. Imagine if every time you tried to communicate and connect with another human being you fell short. If you never make any sense to anybody, if you never connect, you hold no value: you are truly alone. There are those who can survive as genuine outsiders, and then there are those who can't.” - Alan Emmins

70. “I have fooled life and life has fooled me. We are quits. I say good-bye. Think sometimes in the hour of happiness of your poor, comical fool who loved you truly and so well.” - Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing

71. “The reason I don't Kill Myselfis because I know I can.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

72. “When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.” - David Foster Wallace

73. “Alan! How many more times do I have to tell you? We do not say “see you soon” to customers when they leave our shop. We say “goodbye”, because they won’t be coming back, ever. When will you get that into your thick head?” - Jean Teulé

74. “She leaves, carrying a biodegradable carrier bag that reads THE SUICIDE SHOP on one side, and on the other: HAS YOUR LIFE BEEN A FAILURE? LET’S MAKE YOUR DEATH A SUCCESS!” - Jean Teulé

75. “The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.” - Truman Capote

76. “I canalmost understandwhypeopleleapfrombridges.” - Charles Bukowski

77. “She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this.And when hope is gone, time is punishment.” - Mitch Albom

78. “Seemingly suicidal, it's not. I never wanted to live. I wanted to be happy. Living was always accidental.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

79. “Everyone absolutely knows what a strawberry tastes like, even if you are allergic to them. Everyone absolutely knows what the toilet flushing sounds like. Everyone absolutely scratches their mosquito bites. And I know that I was absolutely ready to die. This wasn't a cry for help. I didn't want to be saved. I was ready to call it quits. Done. Terminado.” - Kimberly Russell

80. “He killed himself for wanting to live.” - Markus Zusak

81. “It was soon after that I, overwhelmed with the implications of that memory, overdosed - well, somebody did but as it was my mouth and my stomach that was involved I had to take the consequences. Somehow or other (did an alter ring him?) Bruce (from my support group) got to know, drove over and took us to the hospital.” - Carolyn Bramhall

82. “Seven little crazy kids chopping up sticks;One burnt her daddy up and then there were six.Six little crazy kids playing with a hive;One tattooed himself to death and then there were five.Five little crazy kids on a cellar door;One went all schizo and then there were four.Four little crazy kids going out to sea;One wouldn't say a word and then there were three.Three little crazy kids walking to the zoo;One jerked himself too much and then there were two.Two little crazy kids sitting in the sun;One a took a bunch of pills and then there was one.One little crazy kid left all alone;He went and slit his wrists, and then there were none.” - Michael Thomas Ford

83. “You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.” - Edouard Leve

84. “All's well that ends well.''Assuming there's an end somewhere,' Aomame said.Tamaru formed some short creases near his mouth that were faintly reminiscent of a smile. 'There has to be an end somewhere. It's just that nothing's labeled "This is the end." Is the top rung of a ladder labeled "This is the last rung. Please don't step higher than this'?"Aomame shook her head.'It's the same thing,' Tamaru said.Aomame said, 'If you use common sense and keep your eyes open, it becomes clear enough where the end is.'Tamaru nodded. 'And even if it doesn't' -- he made a falling gesture with his finger -- 'the end is right there.” - Haruki Murakami

85. “I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.” - Cecilia Ahern

86. “Since September,I sat one seat behind Anna in algebra.Passed papers to her every day.Studied for tons of tests together.Though it often seemed impossible, Eventually,We always found the unknown for X.But not this time.This equationBounces against my brain.And sneers at all attempted answers.I know I'll re-examine the variables,And reanalyze the unknowns, maybe forever. ButIt won't matter.Because, Anna-I know I'll never figure out Y.Y you didn't want to live-And Y I never noticed.” - Terri Fields

87. “And the only answer I know isThat no child should give up on life.Math deals in absolutes.But life is the most absolute of all.” - Terri Fields

88. “Somehow, I feel almost blinded myself.And I am forever left to wonderWhether telling you how truly specialYou were Might have made a difference.” - Terri Fields

89. “So, Anna, did you knowThat when you kill yourselfThose you say you love,They die too?” - Terri Fields