Despair Quotes
Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.
Ben Ehrenreich
We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.
Rick Tumlinson
One of the best safeguards of our hopes, I have suggested, is to be able to mark off the areas of hopelessness and to acknowledge them, to face them directly, not with despair but with the creative intent of keeping them from polluting all the areas of possibility.
William F. Lynch
We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.
Benjamin E. Sasse
Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.
William Cowper
Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe
Satish Kumar
The soul-stirring image of death is no bugbear to the sage, and is looked on without despair by the pious. It teaches the former to live, and it strengthens the hopes of the latter in salvation in the midst of distress. Death is new life to both.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists - Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I can endure my own despair, but not another's hope.
William Walsh
It is better to pursue a hopeless hope than to give in to black despair.
Isobelle Carmody
To despair over one's sins indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good, does not want to be so weak as to listen occasionally to other talk. No, it insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin.
Soren Kierkegaard
Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
William Styron
After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.
Richard Matheson
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
Ben Lerner
Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.
Terence McKenna
The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.
Norman Cousins
In the landscape of despair, everything was a miracle.
Eric Gamalinda
I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies – and those bodies were so dear to me!
Catherynne M. Valente
