Quotes About Despair

The fashionable life of the capital shattered not merely the fortunes of men, but also their vigour of body and mind. That elegant world of fragrant ringlets, of fashionable mustachios and ruffles—merry as were its doings in the dance and with the harp, and early and late at the wine-cup—yet concealed in its bosom an alarming abyss of moral and economic ruin, of well or ill concealed despair, and frantic or knavish resolves.

Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.

I do not laugh; I do not cry; I'm sweating out the will to die. My past is sliding down the drain; I soon will be myself again.

What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principle that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.

The best of all things for earthly men is not to be born and not to see the beams of the bright sun; but if born, then as quickly as possible to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie deep buried.

But the decay was there, deep and bitter. There was no getting rid of it. She would never be happy again. There might be moments. Small rewards that brought pleasure, but true happiness seemed forever beyond her grasp. And maybe deep down she knew it.

Originally, God was to save individual mind from despair if not disaster, love was an attempt by one mind to possess another mind and justice was a mind's concern for all other minds. In case of the first, mind is too weak and fearful to understand itself. In the second, the nature cripples the reason and over powers human mind! In the third situation, the reason is more evolved and makes the human mind to stand on its own and does what best is possible with respect to other minds!

It is despair that nothing cannot be Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark Of dread. Look upward. Neither firm nor free, Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.

Despair is hope stark dead, presumption is hope stark mad.

While injustice is the worst of sins, despair is the most dangerous; because when you are in despair you care neither about yourself nor about others.

Reply to Objection 4: Even if by a special privilege their predestination were revealed to some, it is not fitting that it should be revealed to everyone; because, if so, those who were not predestined would despair; and security would beget negligence in the predestined.

Therefore, brothers, whensoever ye perceive that ye offend God in any thing, despair not, fly unto repentance, be sorry for your sinful living; bewail your wicked manners, thirst after strength to do the will of God, confess your sins from the very heart, call for grace, desire mercy, and pray unto God that he will forgive you your faults, and he will undoubtedly remit and forgive you all the faults, sins, and trespasses that ye ever committed against him.

I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don't degenerate with time.

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

After all, there is nothing but failure.

I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness.

Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world.

We will never make it under our own stem. Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point in the "Confessions" is a full-scale emotional breakdown.

Cease, every joy, to glimmer on my mind, But leave---oh! leave the light of Hope behind.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To such length has the spirit of Inquiry carried him.