“Nothing like hope to doom you.”
Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 79 “The Badlands” (p. 457)
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book II, Line 354. Variant translation: The only safe course for the defeated is to expect no safety.
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.
“Nothing like hope to doom you.”
Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 79 “The Badlands” (p. 457)
“Let the mind of man be blind to coming doom; he fears, but leave him hope.”
Sit caeca futuri
mens hominum fati; liceat sperare timenti.
Book II, line 14 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
“Hope is the only good that is common to all men; those who have nothing else possess hope still.”
A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 234
Lilith, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Context: I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.
“It is only for those without hope that hope is given.”
“Plenty of hope — for God — no end of hope — only not for us.”
In conversation with Max Brod (1920), after Brod had queried on there being "hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know", as quoted in Franz Kafka: A Biography [Franz Kafka, eine Biographie] (1937) by Max Brod, as translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (1947; 1960); at least as early as Franz Kafka : Parable and Paradox (1962) by Heinz Politzer, this assertion has often appeared paraphrased as: "There is hope, but not for us", and sometimes "There is hope — only not for us."
Variant translations:
Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.
As translated in Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (1988) by Dagmar Barnouw, p. 187
The Corruptions of Society, p. 9 (See also: The American Dream..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)