Quotes About Despair

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.

The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.

Humans cannot reject temptation. When they are plunged into the depths of despair, likened to hell, they will hold on to anything that may help them escape from the situation they are in, even if it's merely a spider's thread, no matter what sort of humans they are.

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.

Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends.

Despair often breeds disease.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I don't really know what people's perception about Palestinians.All art is to better life. We want to create hope and share with others. Create more pleasure, and object to despair. Really it's about that. A space where we can be less aggressed upon.

The challenge throughout has been to tell what I view as the truth about racism without causing disabling despair.

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.

Why do we protect children from life? It's no wonder that we become afraid to live. We're not told what life really is. We're not told that life is joy and wonder and magic and even rapture, if you can get involved enough. We're not told that life is also pain, misery, despair, unhappiness, and tears. I don't know about you, but I don't want to miss any of it. I want to embrace life, and I want to find out what it's all about. I wouldn't want to go through life without knowing what it is to cry.

Kiddies, Graphic Design, if you wield it effectively, is Power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair. In this century, Germany chose to do the former with the swastika, and America opted for the latter with Mickey Mouse and Superman.

Fear is a habit, so is self pity, defeat, anxiety, despair, hopelessness and resignation. You can eliminate all of these negative habits with two simple resolves: I can and I will.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

The one who confidently looks forward to an eternal reward for his efforts in mortality is constantly sustained through his deepest trials. When he is disappointed in love, he does not commit suicide. When loved ones die, he doesn’t despair; when he loses a coveted contest, he doesn’t falter; when war and destruction dissipate his future, he doesn’t sink into a depression. He lives above his world and never loses sight of the goal of his salvation.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Once the ego is not there, there is no expectation, frustration, no desire, no despair. Suddenly one finds oneself falling into a deep harmony with the cosmos. And that harmony is God; that harmony is nirvana; that harmony is tao.

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

No matter what, we always have the power to choose hope over despair, engagement over apathy, kindness over indifference, enthusiasm over lethargy, love over hate. This is our true freedom. Whatever life may throw at us, we have the freedom and ability to choose our attitude. And I believe it is in those moments of choice that we manifest our destiny.

I have nothing against people having work done, it is when I hear tale of girls of 16 queuing up to get bigger breasts, that is when I despair.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military when they should be using that same energy getting rid of the military completely.

I can't eat. I can never eat when I'm in the depths of despair.

Since it is likely that, being men, they would sin every day, St. Paul consoles his hearers by saying 'renew yourselves' from day to day. This is what we do with houses: we keep constantly repairing them as they wear old. You should do the same thing to yourself. Have you sinned today? Have you made your soul old? Do not despair, do not despond, but renew your soul by repentance, and tears, and Confession, and by doing good things. And never cease doing this.

I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up

The spiritual differs from the religious in being able to endure isolation. The rank of a spiritual person is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we religious people are constantly in need of 'the others,' the herd. We religious folks die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the assembly, of the same opinion as the congregation, and so on. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely related to the isolation of the spiritual man.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair; these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whatever your years, there is in every being's heart the love of wonder, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life.

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.

To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.

The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.

I sighed. "What is life but fleeting moments of happiness strung together on necklace of despair?

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.

I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.

You have a bigger view, of something bigger than you, and you have to view that and take that in mind. At times you feel like despair rises up over hope, then other times you feel hopeful again.

An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

I believe I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which situations we find ourselves in. In despair, I would steal food if my children were hungry.

The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.

What is hope but a feeling of optimism, a thought that says things will improve, it won't always be bleak, there's a way to rise above the present circumstances. Hope is an internal awareness that you do not have to suffer forever, and that somehow, somewhere there is a remedy for despair that you will come upon if you can only maintain this expectancy in your heart.

Science still won't explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.

Often the wisdom of the body Clarifies the despair of the spirit.