Despair Quotes

1. "An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger?"
Author: A.M. Jenkins

2. "We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness..."
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair."
Author: Alfred Lord Tennyson

4. "The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels."
Author: Anatole Broyard

5. "It is when we are up against death, when we find ourselves in despair, that the God of cross is near to us. It is through suffering and despair that God is made known to us, for God is found on the cross."
Author: Andrew Root

6. "Divine aids and supports are furnished us under our afflictions (Rom 8:26,27). . . . 'Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities' (Rom 8:26). Not only does hope (a sure expectation of God's making good His promises) support and cheer the suffering saint, leading him to patiently wait for deliverance from his afflictions, but the blessed Comforter has also been given to him in order to supply help to this very end. By His gracious aid, the believer is preserved from being totally submerged by his doubts and fears. By His renewing operations, the spark of faith is maintained, despite all the fierce winds of Satan which assail. By His mighty enabling, the sorely harassed and groaning Christian is kept from sinking into complete skepticism, abject despair, and infidelity. By His quickening power, hope is still kept alive, and the voice of prayer is still faintly heard."
Author: Arthur W. Pink

7. "Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'"
Author: Ayelet Waldman

8. "Start Where You StandStart where you stand and never mind the past,The past won't help you in beginning new,If you have left it all behind at lastWhy, that's enough, you're done with it, you're through;This is another chapter in the book,This is another race that you have planned,Don't give the vanished days a backward look,Start where you stand.The world won't care about your old defeatsIf you can start anew and win success;The future is your time, and time is fleetAnd there is much of work and strain and stress;Forget the buried woes and dead despairs,Here is a brand-new trial right at hand,The future is for him who does and dares,Start where you stand.Old failures will not halt, old triumphs aid,Today's the thing, tomorrow soon will be;Get in the fight and face it unafraid,And leave the past to ancient history,What has been, has been; yesterday is deadAnd by it you are neither blessed nor banned;Take courage, man, be brave and drive ahead,Start where you stand."
Author: Berton Braley

9. "Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair."
Author: Blaise Pascal

10. "OxfordIt is well that there are palaces of peaceAnd discipline and dreaming and desire,Lest we forget our heritage and ceaseThe Spirit's work—to hunger and aspire:Lest we forget that we were born divine,Now tangled in red battle's animal net,Murder the work and lust the anodyne,Pains of the beast ‘gainst bestial solace set.But this shall never be: to us remainsOne city that has nothing of the beast,That was not built for gross, material gains,Sharp, wolfish power or empire's glutted feast.We are not wholly brute. To us remainsA clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,A place of visions and of loosening chains,A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.She was not builded out of common stoneBut out of all men's yearning and all prayerThat she might live, eternally our own,The Spirit's stronghold—barred against despair."
Author: C.S. Lewis

11. "I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision"
Author: Carl Sandburg

12. "One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other."
Author: Charles Simic

13. "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."
Author: David Foster Wallace

14. "Dear Child of God, I write these words because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair, and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end. I want to share with you my faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed. There is no such thing as a totally hopeless case. Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine. God created order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, and God can do so always, can do so now--in our personal lives and in our lives as nations, globally. ... Indeed, God is transforming the world now--through us--because God loves us."
Author: Desmond Tutu

15. "No one prepares you for the death of a pet. It's not quite like losing a human loved one, obviously, but you cannot help but feel a tiny bit of despair. After all, they serve you so loyally. I think they genuinely love you, and they're so protective of you. They do their jobs so instinctually and so exceptionally because that's how God made them."
Author: Fisher Amelie

16. "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."
Author: Flannery O'Connor

17. "Let me be, he said. Despair is the health of the damned."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

18. "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."
Author: H. G. Wells

19. "Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned."
Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz

20. "Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair."
Author: Ieyasu Tokugawa

21. "When I'm lonely I stand in the corner and play my saxophone and feel sorry for myself. I would ask you to accompany me on the piano, but if I did that I wouldn't be lonely, would I? And what's the point of a saxophone if not to celebrate despair?"
Author: Jarod Kintz

22. "Hate is nothing but a feeling that consumes us all in a moment of despair and sorrow; a moment of regret and envy."
Author: Joan Ambu

23. "Woe to him who could look on and say: The fool! If she had waited, if she had let time do its work, her despair would surely have subsided, another man would have turned up to comfort her.— That's just like saying: The fool, dying of fever! If she had waited until his strength returned, his circulation improved, the tumult of his blood calmed down, everything would have turned out well and he would still be alive today!"
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

24. "Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

25. "Frustration, despair, angst, anxiety, hurt, grief, unhappiness, envy, jealousy, and all the other painful emotions are catalysts of change in our lives. They motivate us to do things differently, to change our status quo."
Author: Kate Levinson

26. "Ride with an outlaw, die with him," he added. "I admit it's a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I'm sorry you crossed the line, though." Jake's momentary optimism had passed, and he felt tired and despairing. He would have liked a good bed in a whorehouse and a nice night's sleep. "I never seen no line, Gus," he said. "I was just trying to get to Kansas without getting scalped."
Author: Larry McMurtry

27. "I am not made for despair"
Author: Lian Hearn

28. "And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word."
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

29. "Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope."
Author: Mahalia Jackson

30. "I am prone to despair. We are all born with a particular personality. I get afraid and then I don't want to leave the house."
Author: Marian Keyes

31. "Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair."
Author: Matthew Arnold

32. "I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214"
Author: Melody Beattie

33. "At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors;the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in thegarden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love."
Author: Octavio Paz

34. "Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almost frenetic tension that hangs in the air just below the clouds. By dusk, spread thin across the quilt-work farmlands by disparate prairie winds, this formless energy creates an abscess in the fabric of space and time that most individuals rarely take notice of. But in the soulish chambers of particularly sensitive observers, it elicits a familiar recognition—a vague remembrance—of something both dark and beautiful. Some understand it simply as an undefined tranquility tinged with despair over the loss of something now forgotten. For others, it signifies something far more sinister, and is therefore something to be feared."
Author: P.S. Baber

35. "When too many Americans don't vote or participate, some see apathy and despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out of this frustration can come hope and action."
Author: Paul Wellstone

36. "Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

37. "We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.Which of us were fortunate--who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love--life.Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you."
Author: Richard Aldington

38. "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?"
Author: Rick Riordan

39. "If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them."
Author: Robert Graves

40. "A friend called the other day.'How are you?' she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?"
Author: Sally Brampton

41. "He looked at her in bittersweet despair. "Sometimes, Kate, when I'm inside you and your arms are around me, I'm human again. There's a beginning and an end to my life again. And all because of your love. It's been a gift to me, one I've never deserved. But I cherished it."And maybe he'd destroyed it with the ungodly truth. He didn't know. He drewa shaky breath, battered by a fresh wave of regret, and his voice trembled. "I thought I had broken your heart a while ago. I didn't know how to make you hear me, and I knew that by telling you the truth, I'd lose you. But here you sit. You haven't flipped out, not visibly anyway, nor accused me of being a liar. And you haven't run in terror, now that you're truly free to go. I don't know what to think. Tell me, Kate…have I lost you?"
Author: Shelby Reed

42. "Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair."
Author: Sonya Hartnett

43. "Satan's despair is absolute because Satan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair."
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

44. "Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean."
Author: Thomas C. Oden

45. "Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men...(The Everlasting No)"
Author: Thomas Carlyle

46. "I can not stop despair but I can stand up & speak truthfully against it to make it uncomfortable every time it knocks on my door!Bullying Ben"
Author: Timothy Pina

47. "I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves.""What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried."No—no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

48. "...neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store --- hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labor camp --- they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be..."
Author: Vasily Grossman

49. "Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her."
Author: Virginia Woolf

50. "The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life."
Author: Wendell Berry

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