Quotes About Despair

Why do people have to live like animals, eating and reproducing, possessed by the instinct for survival? What point is there in having a dozen sons if your own life is miserable and senseless?

According to the Buddha's teachings, the most basic condition for happiness is freedom. Here we do not mean political freedom, but freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy, and delusion. These mental formations are described by the Buddha as poisons. As long as these poisons are still in our heart, happiness cannot be possible.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

He had some impression that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived.

One day we are children, our faces are bright and open. We want to know how machines work. We are in love with polar bears. The next day we're throwing ourselves down the stairs, drunk and weeping. Our lives are over. We hate life and we hate death.

Suicide is one way of saying you're sorry.

All creation is really a re-creation of a once loved and once whole, but now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self. It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair—it is then that we must re-create our world anew, reassemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re- create life.

This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith. It

The modern discovery of history and historical consciousness owed one of its greatest impulses neither to a new enthusiasm for the greatness of man, his doings and sufferings, nor to the belief that the meaning of human existence can be found in the story of mankind, but to the despair of human reason, which seemed adequate only when confronted with man-made objects.

Needless to add, where men live in truly miserable conditions this passion for freedom is unknown.

Anyone who cannot cope with 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 jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.

Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness - the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair - like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attractions. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere ... they would find love and lost love and recover from love and love again.

It was the last night that she would breathe the same air as he, or look out over the deep sea and up into the star-blue heaven. A dreamless, eternal night awaited her, for she had no soul and had not been able to win one.

Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, the sand a dazzling white powder, the sky a pure blue that could only be God's blank canvas, the sun a soothing and rich as a Swedish masseur with a snifter of cognac, and he was intensely miserable.

At one time, this might have been a nice area, but now the neighborhood looked like a man who'd lost his job and stopped bathing.

Worn tires and ripped mattresses lay like war wounded in the middle of the road. Big chunks of cement peeked out from the high grass. There were stripped cars and while there were no fires burning, maybe there should have been.

Stagger's whole being emanated exhaustion. His eyes were red and sunken. His normal five o'clock shadow had darkened into something closer to midnight. His shoulders stooped like a buzzard too tired to go after its prey. "You

Human life moves only in one direction - toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain stagnant or, in certain cases, return to a previous condition when things weren't as bad as they've become for you.

Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.

I lean towards traditionally what people would consider the more negative side of life.

Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.

How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.