Despair Quotes - page 3

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises and oft it hits where hope is coldest and despair most sits. (William Shakespeare)
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].
Simone de Beauvoir
The tempest was terrible and separated me from my other vessels that night, putting every one of them in desperate straits, with nothing to look forward to but death. Each was certain the others had been destroyed. What man ever born, not excepting Job, who would not have died of despair, when in such weather seeking safety for my son, my brother, shipmates, and myself, we were forbidden access to the land and the harbors which I, by God's will and sweating blood, had won for Spain.
Christopher Columbus
My only hope lies in my despair.
Jean Racine
You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
Benjamin Disraeli
I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.
Joseph Conrad
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
C. S. Lewis
Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214.
Melody Beattie
Therefore, let us not despair, but instead, survey the position, consider carefully the action we must take, and then address ourselves to our common task in a mood of sober resolution and quiet confidence, without haste and without pause. (Arthur Henderson)
To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
James Hillman
We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.
Yehuda Berg
I am not made for despair.
Lian Hearn
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.
Comte de Lautreamont
Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair.
Ieyasu Tokugawa
This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness.
Isaac Mayer Wise
The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.
Paul Westerberg
The only real laughter comes from despair.
Groucho Marx
When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis. (Rollo May)
Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
Evelyn Waugh
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz
He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.
Menander