Quotes About Despair

when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.

when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarette, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned

I have nothing to expect from life any more." What sort of answer can one give to that?

the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.

we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died.

Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless.

mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.

O]ur patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful.

The shock, the pain, the agonizing self-pity over the fact that he would never see her again, never hold her, never smell her, the list went on, and on, and on like some pounding surf that threatened to drown him.

What madness destroyed me and you, Orpheus?

I dragged on my ruined life in darkness and grief, wrathful in my heart...

No help or hope of help existed.

Una salus victis, nullam sperare salutem!

The one safety for the defeated is to have no hope of safety

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…

I'm not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.

His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another step into the pit.