Quotes About Despair

Compared with the person who is conscious of his despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a negativity further away from the truth and deliverance. . . . Yet ignorance is so far from breaking the despair or changing despair to nondespairing that it can in fact be the most dangerous form of despair. . . . An individual is furthest from being conscious of himself as spirit when he is ignorant of being in despair. But precisely this-not to be conscious of oneself as spirit-is despair, which is spiritlessness. . . .

If there's more that you can do, then do it. If there's not more that you can do, then be content with what you're doing. But if there is despair, the despair can only be that you can do more. Because when you're doing as much as you can do, you will not feel despair. Because despair is the gap between what you could be doing and what you are doing.

Just as doubt, despair, and desensitization go together, so do faith, hope, and charity. The latter, however, must be carefully and constantly nurtured, whereas despair, like dandelions, needs so little encouragement to sprout and spread. Despair comes so naturally to the natural man!

I shall despair when I despair of myself, of God and humanity.

I don't keep from despairing. I let myself despair. I just don't linger there for too long. There's too much to laugh about, two knuckleheads I have to feed, and a lot of really excellent television to watch. I think the mess we're in deserves the full range of human feeling, from despair to its opposite, which I would say is not hope, happiness, or peace, but freedom.

I would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.

I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing as they must if they believe they can do nothing. There is nothing worse because the council of despair is declaration of irresponsibility; it is Pilate washing his hands.

I will light candles this Christmas, Candles of joy, despite all sadness, Candles of hope where despair keeps watch. Candles of courage where fear is ever present, Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days, Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens. Candles of love to inspire all my living, Candles that will burn all the year long.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep,those haunted by one thing or another:love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.

Between cowardice and despair, valour is gendred.

A smile flickered across Coral’s face. “Have you ever noticed that once you have had a taste of certain sweets—raspberry trifle is my own despair—it is quite impossible not to think, not to want, not to crave until you have taken another bite?” “Lord Swartingham is not a raspberry trifle.” “No, more of a dark chocolate mousse, I should think,” Coral murmured. “And,” Anna continued as if she hadn’t heard the interruption, “I don’t need another bite, uh,night of him.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars -- an intellectual ocean -- toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain.

... bringing up daughters for nothing but marriage, mingles poison in the cup of domestic life, is traitorous to the virtue of both sexes, for neither suffers alone--is adverse to the happiness, to the development of conscience and to religion, and introduces to the dwellings of wretchedness and despair. The result of this degradation is pride, intemperance, licentiousness--nay, every vice, misery, and degradation.

Once a person has taken their life, in the inner realms, the suicide will repeat automatically the feelings of despair and fear which preceded his self murder, and go through the act and the death struggle time after time with ghastly persistence... They remain conscious - often entangled in the final scene of the earth life for a very long time, unaware that they have lost the physical body.

The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged.

The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.

When you become rich and famous and you get a lot of attention, very few people get to go through that cycle without having a hard time. Everybody in their lives has a hard period. I don't know anybody who's ever been alive who hasn't had like, heartbreak, despair, depression, death, drug or alcohol, or weight problems, or health problems.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

For a shaman, all things considered taboo get ripped apart, and one feels the satisfaction of being freed from agony through vituperation and laughter. Hence, shamanism could be said to have developed a means to tackle and override the barriers, oppression, and despair that tend to obstruct life.

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.

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

There are times when you are in despair, because in order not to betray who you are, you don't compromise, you don't make movies that would be very lucrative or prestigious or easily understood. And yet I stay attached to the most uncanny premises. It's never been easy.

I found that my wounds begin to heal when the voices of those endangered by silence are given power. The silence of hopelessness, of despair buried in the depths of poverty, violence, racism are more deadly than bullets. The gift of light, in our compassion, our listening, our works of love is the gift of life to ourselves.

This thing called love was a total mystery to me, but the vagaries of passion and despair that accompanied each devotion kept my life in high drama.

The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan - what's she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair.

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

I have often been downcast, but never in despair.

Age-based retirement arbitrarily severs productive persons from their livelihood, squanders their talents, scars their health, strains an already overburdened Social Security system, and drives many elderly people into poverty and despair. Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.

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

In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others.

We are all unique, which makes us beautiful; so never despair, and just chill the hell out about it all.

If you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

The West is supporting, even financing the right-wing media, it is financing 'the opposition', encourages capital flight of billions of dollars, works closely with the local 'elites' to create 'deficits', 'uncertainty' and despair. It creates corruption scandals, and it even supports fake 'left' anti-government movements. And of course it is training and corrupting some key military cadres.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

At some point I just acknowledged, at least to myself, that I had a great deal of respect for people of faith. Faith is a strange and wonderful thing. You come up to a kind of wall of unknowing and instead of turning back in despair you leap over it into something else. The Church isn't why I'm a writer, but it's probably a part of it.

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

I'm too amused by the way people carry on to give in to despair.

The stockmarket is a semi-psychotic creature given to extremes of elation and despair.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable.

False hope is worse than despair.

We stood up and bade each other farewell, but love and despair stood between us like two ghosts, one stretching his wings with his fingers over our throats, one weeping and the other laughing hideously. As I took Selma's hand and put it to my lips, she came close to me and placed a kiss on my forehead, then dropped on the wooden bench. She shut her eyes and whispered softly, "Oh, Lord God, have mercy on me and mend my broken wings!