Popular quotes about Despair! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 30
But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.
J. M. CoetzeeTo those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
Albert CamusTo him whom contemplates a trait of natural beauty, no harm nor despair can come. The doctrines of despair, spiritual or political servitude, were never taught by those who shared the serenity of Nature. For each phase of Nature, though not invisible, is yet not too distinct or obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not too demanding of our attention.
Henry David ThoreauI think despair and cynicism are two different things. On the flip side of hope is despair. Belief and doubt are the same thing, in that to believe something you have to actively doubt the opposite. And from my perspective, that's the deep end. You're dealing with the unknown; you're dealing with mystery.
Jon ForemanIf clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.
George SantayanaMen without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.
Robert KennedyDespair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.
Hermann HesseNobody grows old merely by living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but giving up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair - these are the long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. You are as young as your faith and as old as your doubts; as young as you self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
James E. FaustDoes anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May SartonWhat moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.
George EliotInstead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Susan SontagSometimes I do readings and people canโt stop laughing, but Iโm reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. Itโs despair - just keep laughing, until you are dead.
Alina BronskySubordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.
Friedrich NietzscheA smile flickered across Coralโs face. โHave you ever noticed that once you have had a taste of certain sweetsโraspberry trifle is my own despairโit is quite impossible not to think, not to want, not to crave until you have taken another bite?โ โLord Swartingham is not a raspberry trifle.โ โNo, more of a dark chocolate mousse, I should think,โ Coral murmured. โAnd,โ Anna continued as if she hadnโt heard the interruption, โI donโt need another bite, uh,night of him.
Elizabeth HoytI am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream
Jack KerouacYou have the choice. You can choose joy over despair, happiness over tears, action over apathy, growth over stagnation.
Leo BuscagliaCourage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
Diane de PoitiersEnvy, like a cold prison, benumbs and stupefies; and, conscious of its own impotence, folds its arms in despair.
Jeremy CollierWhen he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. "This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said. "My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!
Susanna ClarkeThe Bible, which ranges over a period of four thousand years, records but one instance of a death-bed conversion (the thief on the cross) - one that none may despair, and but one that none may presume.
Thomas GuthrieBoredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.
Giacomo LeopardiOn one level my sense of despair had been dispelled by therapy, yet on another it had not been replaced by either the desire for a future or the concept of one. I felt more aware of who I was, but that in itself-dominated as it was by sensations of fragmentation and isolation-filled me with no great hope, and in many ways only fuelled an appetite for destruction.
Anthony LoydI don't panic. The same thing applies to me as to everybody else, so I'm given to euphoria and despair. And I would say that I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.
George SorosWhen they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.
Abbe PierreThere 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.
Abraham Joshua HeschelHis fair landlady was in despair. She would most willingly have made M. d'Artagnan her husband--such a handsome man, and such a fierce mustache!
Alexandre DumasThe palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.
Lisa St. Aubin de TerรกnIn fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.
E. A. BucchianeriPanic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.
Janet FitchYour perspective is vital to your happiness. Some, blind to the bountiful opportunities around them, live lives of sadness and despair with brief moments of joy. Be alive to the abundant potential that surrounds you so that you live a life of peace and happiness with periods of challenging growth.
Richard G. ScottI often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what theyโre really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted, can bring to readers a connection to the wonder of life. A good novel shows how life can and ought to be lived. It not only entertains but energizes and uplifts readers.
Terry GoodkindI've been asked several times since the book Love and Trouble came out, "Are you still sad?" And I'm not, not in the way I was before. I do feel like it was a season in hell that I passed through. But now I'm in despair and sad and confused every day because of our political situation. So the question is: Is it harder or easier to be sad with a reason?
Claire DedererIn the meantime, we have just incredible economic disparities and economic despair in this country and an entire generation that is basically held hostage in debt without the jobs to get out of it. And this is not a world that's working for us, and the climate is going up in flames right now, and the wars are expanding, and we've got 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. This is not a good picture, and I think the American people are discovering that.
Jill SteinI greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.
Leonard CohenShe had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachersโstern and wild onesโand they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Nathaniel HawthorneSkepticism turns to cynicism, which leads to apathy and despair, which can cause sleeplessness, dry-mouth, and loss of sex drive?
Al FrankenI think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.
Studs TerkelDisease, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere, or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair, but no, you sent us Congress! Good God, Sir, was that fair?
Peter Stone... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.
Marcel Proust