Quotes and Sayings about Despair
"But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain."
- Theodor Adorno
(Related: Life, Despair)
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."
- Aeschylus
(Related: Wisdom, God, Heart, Despair, Forget, Grace, Pain, Sleep, Will)
"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."
- Laurie Anderson
(Related: People, Corporate, Despair, Suffering, Wonder)
"When you get to know me, I don't despair - I just get up, clean up, and start again."
- Avi Arad
(Related: Despair)
"Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair."
- Matthew Arnold
(Related: Dream, Despair)
"Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair."
- Matthew Arnold
(Related: Despair, Patience)
"So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair."
- Antonin Artaud
(Related: Causes, Despair, Man, Right)
"Action is the antidote to despair."
- Joan Baez
(Related: Action, Despair)
"You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy."
- Joan Baez
(Related: Despair, End, May)
"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."
- Mikhail Bakunin
(Related: Idea, Hope, Day, Despair, Passion)
"Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy."
- Honore De Balzac
(Related: Men, Despair, Ecstasy, Spirits)
"Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties."
- Benjamin Banneker
(Related: Courage, Despair, Difficulties, Neglect, Sight)
"Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought."
- Joseph Barbera
(Related: Thought, Impression, Failure, Despair, Disappointment)
"Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them."
- Georges Bataille
(Related: Dreams, Despair, Results, Violence, Weakness)
"It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Work, Despair)
"Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope."
- Bernard Berenson
(Related: Hope, Despair)
"The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair."
- Jose Bergamin
(Related: Despair, Disillusionment)
"Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down."
- Hector Berlioz
(Related: Time, Ideas, Despair)
"Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
- William Blake
(Related: Love, Care, Despair, Heaven, Hell)
"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."
- Ella R. Bloor
(Related: Government, Children, Day, Despair, Faces, Forget, Parents, State, Victims)
"On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings."
- Nellie Bly
(Related: Freedom, Sight)
"Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods."
- Norman Borlaug
(Related: Gods, Catastrophes, Despair, Spirits, Supernatural)
"It has never been, and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination."
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
(Related: Hope, Despair, Road, Will)
"If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable."
- Andre Breton
(Related: Love, State)
"Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Despair, Snobbery)
"There was a castle called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair."
- John Bunyan
(Related: Despair)
"Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair."
- Edmund Burke
(Related: Work, 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."
- Mangosuthu Buthelezi
(Related: Hope, Day, Despair, Fact, Help, Nothing)
"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."
- Robert Byrd
(Related: Government, Fear, Achievement, Hope, Congress, Despair, Today)
"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
- Albert Camus
(Related: Beauty, Time, Despair, Eternity)
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
- Albert Camus
(Related: Hope, Fool)
"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
- Albert Camus
(Related: Life, Sin)
"There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Despair, Folly, Man, World)
"There's one thing which I hate about color films... people who use up a lot of their despairing producer's money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color films where there isn't any color."
- Claude Chabrol
(Related: Money, People, Hate)
"Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair."
- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
(Related: Despair)
"Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference."
- Charlie Chaplin
(Related: Despair, Indifference, Mind)
"We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure."
- Cesar Chavez
(Related: Strength, Despair)
"From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength."
- Cesar Chavez
(Related: Work, People, Strength, Despair, Dignity, Needs, Problems)
"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."
- John Cheever
(Related: Despair, Literature, Lovers, Salvation, World)
"The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image."
- Charles W. Chesnutt
(Related: Heart, Despair, Mystery, Reflection, Universe)
"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."
- Agatha Christie
(Related: Living, Sorrow)
"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."
- Agatha Christie
(Related: Sorrow)
"To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Habit, Despair)
"We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Despair, Formula)
"Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true."
- Leonard Cohen
(Related: Compassion, Despair, Judges, Killing, Will)
"Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study."
- William Congreve
(Related: Despair, Flags, Invention, Study)
"Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!"
- Pierre Corneille
(Related: Age)
"Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair."
- William Cowper
(Related: Love, Death, Hope, Absence, Despair)
"The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair."
- Michael Cunningham
(Related: Despair, Difference, Trying)
"Despair is the conclusion of fools."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Despair, Fools)
"Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven."
- John Donne
(Related: Despair, Heaven, Hell, Joy, Serenity)
"I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me."
- Olympia Dukakis
(Related: Being, Despair)
"Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss."
- Alexandre Dumas
(Related: Despair, Feeling, Man)
"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."
- William Dunbar
(Related: Despair, Mirth, Romantic)
"We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Despair, Humanity)
"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 have recovered hope."
- George Eliot
(Related: Hope, Despair, First, Moments, Sorrow)
"But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope."
- George Eliot
(Related: Hope, Despair)
"A rabbi should not despair if people do not do as much as they should. Every parent has that with children. God is merciful."
- Louis Finkelstein
(Related: God, People, Children, Despair)
"The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Life, Success, Accomplishments, Challenge, Despair, Future, Moments, Promise)
"Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom."
- Anatole France
(Related: Boredom, Despair, Humanity, Lies)
"Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected."
- Robert Frank
(Related: Hope, Colors, Despair, Mankind, Photography)
"Now you watch the parades and processions of hopeful and despairing people walking outside your tomb. They are all looking for the answer to the problem you know so well."
- Lynette Fromme
(Related: People, Now, Walking)
"Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith."
- Christopher Fry
(Related: Faith, Truth, Comedy, Despair)
"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."
- Stephen Fry
(Related: Purpose, Despair, Direction, Future, Sense, Word)
"Despair gives courage to a coward."
- Thomas Fuller
(Related: Courage, Despair)
"Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature."
- Mohandas Gandhi
(Related: Nature, Love, Despair, Evil, Human nature, Influence, Yield)
"Law is born from despair of human nature."
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
(Related: Nature, Despair, Human nature, Law)
"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."
- Robin Gibb
(Related: Anger, Despair, Dying, Feeling)
"Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity."
- Edmond De Goncourt
(Related: Act, Despair, Infinity)
"If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them."
- Robert Graves
(Related: Men, Women, Despair)
"Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair."
- Robert Greene
(Related: Despair, Sorrow, Waste)
"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."
- Angelina Grimke
(Related: Act, Denial, Despair, Duty, May, Right, Silence)
"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
(Related: Action, Confidence, Despair, Haste, Quiet, Resolution)
"A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair."
- Abraham Joshua Heschel
(Related: Love, Time, God, Thought, Strength, Compassion, Defiance, Despair, Harm, Man, Religious)
"It is my firm belief that I have a link with the past and a responsibility to the future. I cannot give up. I cannot despair. There's a whole future, generations to come. I have to keep trying."
- King Hussein
(Related: Belief, Despair, Future, Generations, Past, Responsibility, Trying)
"It is not enough to tackle the mechanics of terror organizations. We must also tackle the situations that create terrorists. We desperately need to address the frustration, the loss and the despair that drive some to these actions."
- King Hussein I
(Related: Actions, Despair, Frustration, Loss, Terror)
"Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair."
- Eugene Ionesco
(Related: God, Despair, Shakespeare)
"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."
- Andrew Jackson
(Related: Government, Intelligence, People, Fear, Virtue, Confidence, Despair, Majority, Result)
"Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope."
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: Hope, Despair, Songs)
"The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy."
- Max Jacob
(Related: Despair, Expression, Joy, Reality)
"My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair."
- Thomas Jefferson
(Related: Dream, Hope, Despair, Theory)
"When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make."
- James Weldon Johnson
(Related: Despair, London, Man, Paris, Sadness, Ugly)
"If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Determination, Perseverance, Strength, Despair, Diligence, Skill)
"I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike."
- Mary Harris Jones
(Related: Men, Children, Clothes, Despair, Martyrs, Mothers, Sanity)
"Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Despair, Fact)
"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Life, Despair, Fate, Needs)
"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."
- Denis Kearney
(Related: Aristocracy, Despair, Misery, World)
"To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust."
- John F. Kennedy
(Related: Trust, Despair, Facts, Future, Heir, Obligation, Past, State)
"Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself."
- Soren Kierkegaard
(Related: Boredom, Evil)
"Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation."
- Emile Lahud
(Related: Belief, Despair, Frustration, Will)
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."
- R. D. Laing
(Related: Despair, Understanding)
"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."
- Comte de Lautreamont
(Related: Desire, Despair, Literature, Order, Sense)
"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."
- Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont
(Related: Beginning, Despair, Doubt, Melancholy, Sadness, Wickedness)
"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes."
- Vladimir Lenin
(Related: Causes, Despair, Evil, Struggle)
"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
(Related: Truth, Comfort, Despair, End, May, Thinking, Will)
"The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves."
- John L. Lewis
(Related: Corporate, Rights, Nation, Treatment, Waiting, Workers, Wrongs)
"God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair."
- Joseph Barber Lightfoot
(Related: God, Despair, Spirit)
"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
(Related: Happiness, Despair, Joy, Needs, Security, Spring)
"Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair."
- David Livingstone
(Related: Work, Despair, Nothing, Will)
"No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Despair, Nothing)
"A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair."
- Niccolo Machiavelli
(Related: Father, Son, Despair, Inheritance, Loss, May)
"It was despairing to find out that I am mortal."
- Magnus Magnusson
"Uncertainty! fell demon of our fears! The human soul that can support despair, supports not thee."
- David Mallet
(Related: Soul, Despair, Support)
"Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always."
- Andre Malraux
(Related: Love, Time, History, Truth, Despair, End)
"To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us."
- Philip Massinger
(Related: Despair, Doubt)
"Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."
- Rollo May
(Related: Courage, Absence, Despair)
"Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through."
- Susannah McCorkle
(Related: God, Despair, Feeling, Songs)
"In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful."
- Don McLean
(Related: Sense, Song)
"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition."
- Marshall McLuhan
(Related: Despair, Feeling)
"He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor."
- Menander
(Related: Despair, Diligence, Labor)
"I've found a different way to scent the air: already it's a by-word for despair."
- Andrew Motion
(Related: Despair)
"Would not the child's heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love?"
- Max Muller
(Related: Love, Mother, Father, Heart, Despair, Eyes, First, Light, Reflection, World)
"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
- Haruki Murakami
(Related: Despair, Writing)
"The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears."
- Alfred de Musset
(Related: Songs, Tears)
"I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within."
- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
(Related: Nature, Artists, Creation, Despair, Glory)
"I do believe that most men live lives of quiet desperation. For despair, optimism is the only practical solution. Hope is practical. Because eliminate that and it's pretty scary. Hope at least gives you the option of living."
- Harry Nilsson
(Related: Men, Hope, Optimism, Despair, Desperation, Living, Pretty, Quiet, Solution)
"My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage."
- Peggy Noonan
(Related: Belief, Choice, Despair, Now, Religious)
"The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares."
- Henri Nouwen
(Related: Friend, Bereavement, Confusion, Despair, Grief, Healing)
"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."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Age, Despair)
"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."
- Ben Okri
(Related: Despair)
"Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: God, Despair, Pride)
"Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song."
- Pope John Paul II
(Related: People, Despair, Easter, Song)
"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."
- Walker Percy
(Related: Life, Possibility, Despair)
"When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives."
- Abbe Pierre
(Related: People, Despair)
"If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Death, Despair, Will, Wrong)
"In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else."
- Ernie Pyle
(Related: Victory, Being, Despair, Excitement, Expression, Eyes, Hatred, Nothing)
"The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair."
- Herbert Read
(Related: Attitude, Belief, Positive, Despair, Today)
"I despair of ever writing excellent poetry."
- Isaac Rosenberg
(Related: Poetry, Despair, Writing)
"Life begins on the other side of despair."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
(Related: Life, Despair)
"Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair."
- Friedrich Schiller
(Related: Food, Delight, Despair, End, Murder, Revenge)
"Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair."
- William Shakespeare
(Related: God, Comfort, Darkness, Despair, Light, Now)
"No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart."
- Martin Sheen
(Related: Heart, Despair, May, Military, Running, states, United, Universe, World)
"Despair often breeds disease."
- Sophocles
(Related: Despair, Disease)
"I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal."
- Terry Southern
(Related: Alienation, Despair)
"Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies."
- John Shelby Spong
(Related: Life, People, Negative, Despair, Enemies, Terrorism)
"If you don't love it, you can't suffer thru all the despair that comes with it. Keep doing it because you love it."
- Robert Stack
(Related: Love, Despair)
"Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners."
- John Steinbeck
(Related: War, Army, Despair, Football, Games, Glory, State)
"Despair has its own calms."
- Bram Stoker
(Related: Despair)
"When we contemplate the heroes of Christianity, and compare our feeble efforts with their astonishing performance and self devotion, we should fall into despair, were there not a few softening features, by which they are brought back to the ranks of humanity."
- John Strachan
(Related: Performance, Christianity, Despair, Devotion, Heroes, Humanity, Self)
"I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair."
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
(Related: Action, Despair)
"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."
- Studs Terkel
(Related: People, Hope, Optimism, 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."
- Studs Terkel
(Related: Hope, Despair, World)
"Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you."
- William Makepeace Thackeray
(Related: Despair, Promise)
"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
(Related: Despair, Discontent, Imperfection, Will)
"To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people."
- Alice Walker
(Related: Mother, People, Despair, Future, Hatred, Woman)
"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."
- Mercy Otis Warren
(Related: Success, Courage, Americans, Despair, Military, Resolution, Respect, Result)
"It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair."
- Lawrence Welk
(Related: Act, Despair, Moments)
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."
- H. G. Wells
(Related: Time, Despair, Future, Race)
"When too many Americans don't vote or participate, some see apathy and despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out of this frustration can come hope and action."
- Paul Wellstone
(Related: Action, Hope, Americans, Apathy, Despair, Disappointment, Frustration, Vote)
"You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection."
- Morris West
(Related: Causes, Despair, Fact, Perfection)
"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
(Related: Darkness, Despair, Suicide)
"Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings."
- Elie Wiesel
(Related: Hope, Despair)
"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
- Elie Wiesel
(Related: Despair, Duty)
"We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else."
- Elie Wiesel
(Related: Despair)
"To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing."
- Raymond Williams
(Related: Hope, Despair, Radical)
"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
(Related: Soul, Thoughts, Darkness, Despair, Grief, Mind, Sorrow)
"Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting."
- P. G. Wodehouse
(Related: Life, Despair, Salvation, Worth)
"If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?"
- Francis Parker Yockey
(Related: Optimism, Pessimism, Cowardice, Despair, Stupidity)
"I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking."
- Loretta Young
(Related: Despair, Thinking, Want)