quotations about despair
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Consider how the desperate fight;
Despair strikes wild, but often fatal too--
And in the mad encounter wins success.
WILLIAM HAVARD
Regulus
Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
JANET FINCH
White Oleander
In my heaven of despair
Lies the ocean of impurity
A ship made of angel's hair
Set sails on the morning tide
COVENANT
"Shipwreck", Dreams of Cryotank
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
The Disappointment of Manhood succeeds to the delusion of Youth: let us hope that the heritage of Old Age is not Despair.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Vivian Grey
Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
Desperation is energized despair.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
Real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.
ELIE WIESEL
"Hope, Despair, and Memory", Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986
Though thou drewest a sword at thy friend, yet despair not: for there may be a returning to favour.
BIBLE
Ecclesiastes 22:21
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"L. N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement", Nash Put, November 28, 1910
Despair gives courage to a coward.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.
R. S. THOMAS
"Tidal", Mass for Hard Times
Thus repuls'd, our final hope
Is flat despair.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Sadness, despair
Sometimes the things I cherish,
Sometimes that's all I've got,
And that's enough
NAPALM DEATH
"Contemptuous", Utopia Banished
Despair leadeth damnation in chains.
ST. BERNARD
attributed, Antiquity: Or, The Wise Instructor
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
What burning agony of the soul, what direful convulsions of the brain attend despair, when every hope seems gone, and when every throb of the heart is a death-stroke; when the fibre of every nerve is charged with piercing, searching, and writhing tortures, and the intensity of life is upon us; here it is where the unfaltering energy of great minds fails not, but boldly wrestles with it.
ACTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Despair demands man's entire strength, all the seriousness and concentration of his soul. Despair can become the unhappy man's god and a guide in the discovery of his own nature. Despair is as intense as labor pains. The despairing person is about to give birth to himself and become conscious of his own value. The moment of despair can be of greater consequence than anything on heaven or earth, for man binds himself to an eternal power and perceives himself from then on as a creature whose memory can never be erased by time.
SAMUEL HUGO BERGMAN
Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber