Despair Quotes

It seems like I have lived a lifetime in just one day.

...How terrible, those dreams before sleep were—the worse kind, mixing hope with despair...

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.

Man may fail you. But God will never forsake you.

But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.

I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finney. “They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why?” “You were free.” “I was free. Milton was right…the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now.

What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain?

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.

May we always be burdened with thinking of the suffering of others, for that is what it means to be human.

Adversity tests what the soul can endure.

You’re trying to look for rock bottom, to that part of yourself that could no longer feel pain. But there is no such thing as rock bottom. As long as there is left to destroy in you, you’d do it. We always feel the need to sink ourselves because we keep being intolerable, because if we’re suffering then maybe people would give us a break for all the shameful things we do. You think you could impose your own penance, but it never goes away, does it? That kind of deadening that’s worse than actual dying.

But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it.

Tell me, who have never be knocked down by life’s circumstances? It takes grace and enough strength, to get up and begin again

I had wanted to disappear, if only so the cancer could disappear with me. But the stars whispered that there was no such thing. You don’t ever disappear. You just change. You leave. You move on. But you never disappear. Even when you think you want to.

The word of God gives comfort.

A tired man lay down his headin a dusty room so dim,and for so long his wife did shakeand yell to waken him.Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stirof sandy, red bullfights,of powder-blasts in the airand carnival delights.Yet still his wife was in despairin a dusty room so dim,for she knew death was a whorenot far from tempting him.

Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!

Je pensais de meme que notre jeunesse etait finie et le bonheur manqué. I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.

Forgiveness is a transformative act because it asks you to be a more empathetic and compassionate person, thereby making you better than the person you were when you were first hurt.

We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.

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.

The longest path leads to the destiny destination.

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.

I trusted you with my scarsBut now I'm bleedingSaid I was your moon and you were the starsYou're so deceivingI trusted you with my scarsBut now I'm bleedingThe wound is deep Blood is seeping

Let go of all the pain. Embrace the joy of life.

Why do religious believers hate unbelievers? The feel threatened by them, they feel besieged by them. Religions consider themselves as separate tribes in their own rights and feel like unbelievers will one day overrun their strongholds

[I]t takes so little effort and money to get rid of malaria, to bring in clean water, to give people a chance at an education. When you don't have hope, that's when people start to do weird, horrible, violent things. That's at the bottom of it. It's just a question of prioritizing. The funds are t

To act as though we have hope is to keep hope alive

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

I often think of death. True. Suicide is a reasonable option. True. My sins are unpardonable.I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I leave it blank.

I cannot do it. I cannot bear it. I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong or that good.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone, there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our recollections of veritable love—which indeed is the act of virtue containing all others—call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born.

God is a great healer.

She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.

The only recourse for an escape artist from world affairs is to explore their inner sanctum where hopes, dreams, insecurities, and despair collide.

Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.

...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

In the midst of uncertainty, Doubt stealthy in. And in the face of Doubt, One must hold steadfast to Hope.

Science cannot disprove god. Science studies the things that are. The eternal question is who or what made them to be

Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold, his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not.

Be patient and endure the times.Your glorious days shall come to pass.

I know what is going on in the heart of an atheist. Deep anguish that there is nothing beyond, nothing to live for, nothing to give him hope. I know because I endured the same predicament.

Courage is not the absence of fear or despair; it is the capacity to continue on despite them, no matter how great or overwhelming they become.

Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies!

We all get in a funk sometimes.It doesn't mean you're failing, or ungrateful, or stupid, or lost. It means you're human.The Funk happens. For all of us. We can’t be happy all the time. We don’t need to be.

You'd be surprised, Theo." she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, "what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.

The timeless promises of God are our confident hope.

There are four things that make a man fight as you just did," the duke explained to Rumbold. "Love, despair, anger, or insanity."Erik counted them off on his fingers. "Everything to lose, nothing to lose, someone's taken it, or you've lost it.

You want to know what the saddest part is Tess?” I said, sounding choked up.“What’s that Josh?”I felt my heart constricting as the brutal truth flowed from my lips. “You say she’s mine...but honestly, I don’t think she was ever mine to begin with.

Every word that comes after "And the Lord told me. . . “is a pious lie

Nothing is more seductive than nothing.

I slept and I woke. She gave me a ring made from a leaf, a cluster of golden berries, a flower that opened and closed at the stroking of a finger....And once, when I startled awake with my face wet and my chest aching, she reached out to lay her hand on top of mine. The gesture was so tentative, her expression so anxious, you would think she had never touched a man before. As if she was worried I might break or burn or bite. Her cool hand lay on mine for a moment, gentle as a moth. She squeezed my hand softly, waited, then pulled away.It struck me as odd at the time. But I was too clouded with confusion and grief to think clearly. Only now, looking back, do I realize the truth of things. With all the awkwardness of a young lover, she was trying to comfort me, and she didn't have the slightest idea how.

ROMEO :'Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here,Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dogAnd little mouse, every unworthy thing,Live here in heaven and may look on her,But Romeo may not. More validity,More honorable state, more courtship livesIn carrion flies than Romeo. They may seizeOn the white wonder of dear Juliet’s handAnd steal immortal blessing from her lips,Who even in pure and vestal modesty,Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.But Romeo may not. He is banishèd.Flies may do this, but I from this must fly.They are free men, but I am banishèd.And sayst thou yet that exile is not death?Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife,No sudden mean of death, though ne'er so mean,But “banishèd” to kill me?—“Banishèd”!O Friar, the damnèd use that word in hell.Howling attends it. How hast thou the heart,Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,A sin-absolver, and my friend professed,To mangle me with that word “banishèd”?

Acknowledge that some moments are just plain awful―desperate and gloomy and painful and miserable and nothing at all but anguish. No truthful, cheerful thought in the world will fix it. So let me cry awhile. Don't try to find a sunbeam where a shroud of darkness encloses me. Let me mourn. Then, after the storm, when the tears have run dry and my eyes choose to open, I will look for your rainbow of hope.

If you response to every demand, you will be in despair.

What, whom we put our hope in determines our stability!" EL

Sorrow is God's plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents of Divine joy would be the normal force to open up all our souls' capacities; but in a fallen world, sorrow, with despair taken out of it, is the chosen power to reveal ourselves to ourselves. Hence it is sorrow that makes us think deeply, long, and soberly.