Despair Quotations

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?

Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It's a journey of discovery - there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.

I shall never forget the despair and agony on the parents' faces on the awful day of the funeral when the 13 little children, victims not only of John D. Rockefeller, but of the government of the state of Colorado were buried.

Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair.

I 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.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

There was a castle called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair.

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.

Sometimes to go forward you've got to go to the depths of your own personal despair and claw yourself back. From that point, no matter what happens, you know you can do it.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

I believe I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which situations we find ourselves in. In despair, I would steal food if my children were hungry.

I don't want to live in a culture of despair. I'd like to live in a culture of hope.

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.

Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.

I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.

People are really suffering these days. There's a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

The responses that environmentalists evoke - fear, anxiety, numbness, despair - are not helpful, even if they are understandable. It should be fascinating, even enthralling, to be in the milieu of environmental change.

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.

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.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.

The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.

I tell you it's no joke to paint a portrait. I wonder that I am not more timid when I begin. I feel almost certain that I can do it. It seems very simple. I don't think of the time that is sure to come when I almost despair, when the whole thing seems hopeless.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.

'I, Malvolio' is a very, very funny show, a clown show, but there is Beckettian darkness in the character. Some real darkness, some right close to the edge of despair moments.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair.

You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; And to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China - the greatest and oldest despotism in the world - for a cheap working slave.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

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

Law is born from despair of human nature.

When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

A lot of interviewers are looking for the dark side. They want to know about the depths of your despair and fear.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it, focusing instead on the short-term.

I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst.

It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we’ve reached a point where we’ve discovered most of the things. I’m going tell you right now: Please don’t despair.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, escaping from the drabness and oppressiveness of worldly values and seeing through suburban mentality and normal community standards so that they can find some much-needed relief for their wilting souls.

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.

The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.

God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.

It's easy to lose sight of God when life is sweet and easy, but there is something awesome about despair, and it is the closeness of God when we are at our weakest.

Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!

Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study.

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.

If you're an advocate of gentleness, you're simplistic and naive. If you're an advocate of despair and hate, you're sophisticated.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

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.

As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.

To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

I thought I'd reached the bottom a few times, but then I'd realise there was another 30 floors of despair below that.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

It is necessary above all that the citizens, who have rallied round the constitution, should be assured that the rights it guarantees will be respected with such a scrupulous fidelity as will reduce to despair its enemies, hidden or avowed.

People say you make your best work when you're in despair and all that, and at your lowest - but for me, I think happiness makes you positive, and I think that's a good creative place to write from.

As recently as the September 11 event, the majority of Muslims were, as the rest of the world was, against its violence. However, if despair and humiliation continue in the population of more than one billion Muslims, the world will face increasing risks of conflicts and wars.

I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking.

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

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.'

Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.