Quotes About Despair

Himmelhoch jauchzend und zum Tode betrubt: On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?

We're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.

It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way.

Rumi: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.

Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.

She told me not long ago, "I'm not suicidal, but sometimes I wish I was dead." This is the point beyond exhaustion, when you can't see how you'll ever fill up again. And then she does, through what she calls lunch-money faith: nothing dramatic, and just enough.

Even my Buddhist friends have been feeling despair and when they go bad, you know the end is nigh.

That was the worst truth of all: alone. The word was a kind of death.

When there is so much tragedy and pain in the world that we cannot help, it seems incomprehensible that we should bring even more upon ourselves. Sometimes I despair of mankind.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.

The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.

I stumble through a carnival of horrors

No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.

For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?

You are alone when something like this happens. Doesn't matter how many people love you and want to help you. You are alone. When Marchent died, she was alone.

Pain. Unspeakable pain. It didn't matter who in this world or any other was staring at me, watching me, seeking to share this moment or merely shuddering as I experienced it. Just didn't matter. Because in pain like this one is always alone.

It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.

Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the dispair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the desair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and a beauty then was a horrid irony?

Fear and music and blood and pain. That was still his existence.

If the mind can find no meaning, then the senses give it. Live for this, wretched being that you are.

I was too miserable to take much consolation just from feeling good for a moment in a welter of shudders and salted, bloodstained tears.

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us. I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.