Despair Quotes

Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society.

Some noble spirits mistake despair for content.

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.

The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

Hope and despair ignore one another's cries.

We've all had that fear, that despair of losing someone, or this fierce desire because it's not reciprocated. The less reciprocation there is, the more desire we have.

Talking high philosophy often confuses people, but a look from an egoless person can lift the clouds of pain and despair.

We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.

We need hope. There's nothing worse than to live a life of despair. For a person to have no hope just sucks the blue out of every sky.

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

Let me do my work each day, and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times.

Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?

My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.

To make your voice heard is difficult. Sometimes we have to burn ourselves in order to be heard. It is out of compassion that you do that. It is the act of love and not of despair.

Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery.

I will despair, and be at enmity With cozening hope.

Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

Despair makes priests and friars.

There’s nothing better than an elegant cry of despair.

You have to know your own truth and stick to it. And never despair. Never give up. There's always hope.

Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.

To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.

As in an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of all endeavor for improving himself or bettering hisfellows. All hope in the grand possibilities of life are blasted.

The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

To face life without hope can mean to live without 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.

Be not in despair, the way is very difficult, like walking on the edge of a razor; yet despair not, arise, awake, and find the ideal, the goal.

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

A Dark Night is a mental and emotional state of despair that arises when something is so painful that it blots out all other considerations and makes carrying on as usual out of the question.

Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.

Th' ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire, Victorious. Thus repuls'd, our final hope Is flat despair.

Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair and hopelessness, where people see no future

Now conscience wakes despair That slumber'd,-wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse.

Despair ... 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.

You can always, and easily, give somebody the gift of hope and faith, even in the midst of despair.

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.

I have often been downcast, but never in despair.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair.

I was always much too elated to imagine despair.

One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

Despair snuffs the sun from the firmament.