Quotes about despair

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“I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion. I need sunshine and paving tones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he exited!”

“We walk this earth
hand with hand and head by head
along with shadows of fairy tales
myths and legends spread by superstitious folks
and oddly we yearn to all of them
with sadness and despair
like drowning sailor who longs for sip of air
with playful joy against the odds
we seek to tame good auld death
forgetting that lady D is a wild cat
that carves its paths with fangs and claws step by step
step by step
until she is to close
- inside your head”

“Strictures, reproaches, and intemperate speeches from the Senator of Louisiana are really the wailings of an apostle of despair; he has lost control of himself, he is trying to play billiards with elliptical billiard balls and a spiral cue.”

““Never despair. The darkest point of the night is the closest point to daylight. No success is achieved without effort, so fight for your goals and know that success is near.””

“The darkness isn't afraid of coming close to me, my fear of loneliness draws him towards me. Darkness surrounds me and despair takes hold of me. I start to torment my loneliness, and my silence begins to take my life. When I call my happiness darkness always turns happiness way. Darkness is not afraid of me coming close to me, my fear pulls it to me.”

“The darkness isn't afraid of coming close to me, my fear of loneliness draws him towards me. Darkness surrounds me and despair takes hold of me. I start to torment my loneliness, and my silence begins to take my life. When I call my happiness darkness always turns happiness way. Darkness is not afraid of me coming close to me, my fear pulls it to me.”

“If the love of money is the root of all evil, the need of money is most certainly the root of all despair.”

“If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.”

“I am not made for despair”

“Only someone who had experienced such bitter despair would be able to recognize it in another.”

“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.”

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”

“Never despair. Never surrender.”

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”

“No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

“The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!”

“To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.”

“At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it — but I did bear it. The question remains: how?”

“And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.”

“You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.
You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.”

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”

“If you weaken, I'll be strong. If you get lost, I'll be your way home. If you despair, I'll bring you joy. I will love you until the end of time.”

“I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?”

“Stuart must have sensed my despair from the way I began lightly banging my forehead on the table.”

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

“I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

“When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of hate, suspicion and despair, all the love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge. Though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach faith where no faith was.”

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[…].”

“But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.”

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

“She wondered that hope was so much harder then despair.”

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”

“We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.”

“Despair and Genius are too oft connected”

“For many in our high-paced world, despair is not a moment; it is a way of life.”

“I try to have reasonably happy endings because I would hate any child to be cast down in gloom and despair; I want to show them you can find a way out of it.”

“I remember discussions withwhich went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question:?”

“always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives”

“Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…”

“I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there
At least not over half.”

“To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.”

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

“And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be
like barbed wire to keep out despair,
hope must be a mine field.”

“Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.”

“‎It is better to pursue a hopeless hope than to give in to black despair.”

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

“Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”

“A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.”

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”

“When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.”

“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”

“Some people fall apart when they get hurt. Puddle into apathy and despair and never recover. They wait all their lives for someone to come along and rescue them.”

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

“The only real laughter comes from despair.”

“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost”

“We see a hearse; we think sorrow. We see a grave; we think despair. We hear of a death; we think of a loss. Not so in heaven. When heaven sees a breathless body, it sees the vacated cocoon & the liberated butterfly.”

“You are never stronger… than when you land on the other side of despair.”

“Real courage is not to give up hope, even in the most terrible darkness, and to carry on. That if courage and love is deep as despair, deeper, then light may come again”

“Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.”

“Angel screeched with fury and despair to the empty walls around her. "I'm human, do you hear me? It hurts!”

“It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.”

“Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair..”

“I'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".”

“The Death Mist is not for helping!" Akhlys shrieked. "It shrouds mortals in misery as their souls pass into the Underworld. It is the very breath of Tartarus, of death, of despair!"
"Awesome," Percy said. "Could we get two orders of that to go?”

“And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”

“Your destiny grows clearer, Jason Grace. When the choice comes again- storm or fire- remember me. And do not despair.”

“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”

“Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.”

“Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.”

“Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.”

“We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.”

“Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair.”

“Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”

“I can't help but see myself in them. The Seelie are who I was before my sister died. Pink, pretty, frivolous Mac. The Unseelie are who I've become, carved by loss and despair. Black, grungy, driven Mac.”

“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.”

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.”

“She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.”

“Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.”

“Nil desperandum, -- Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”

“Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom”

“Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our accomplishments. Though we fall short, our labour is not lost if this day surpasses the preceding one.”

“For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.”

“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”

“I hope that the kind reader recognises this as a despairing attempt at humour.”

“Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.”

“I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.”

“Built to be lonely
to love the absent.
Find me
Free me
from this
corrosive doubt
futile despair
horror in repose.
I can fill my space
fill my time
but nothing can fill this void in my heart.”

“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.”

“But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked.

"Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.”

“It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot… or cosmic rays or a power ring… Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.”

“Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.”