Quotes About Despair

The philosophers say that the passions are too lively, too fiery; in truth they are weak and languid. All around one sees the mass of men endure the persecution of a few masters and the despotism of prejudices without offering the slightest resistance... their passions are too weak to permit them to derive audacity from despair.

...the sense of the Absurd, which is despair refusing to take itself seriously.

When laughter feasts, sadness starves.

PATIENCE, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

He had tragic bones and a lifelong lease on a dark cloud.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness: But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Here he had read to me his tear-stained page Of sorrow... here would try To lay his burden in the hands of Song, And make the Poet bear the Lover's wrong, But still his heart impatiently would cry: "In vain, in vain! You cannot teach to flow In measured lines so measureless a woe. First learn to slay this wild beast of despair, Then from his harmless jaws your honey tear!"

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

As Grace recounts in the pages that follow, Detroit's history is embedded with struggles that expose the contradictions inherent in the golden age. However, the city's deep despair further reminds us that, over the past four decades, the U.S. public has largely evaded responsibility for confronting the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism.

Failure too is a form of death.

The end of the world hurts like a bitch.

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.

He was embarrassed by his feelings. He had grown up in a home without love, filled with petty cruelties and alcoholism and despair, a place where dreams of a better life were absurd and worthy of venomous critique from his own father.

He had grown up in a home without love, filled with petty cruelties and alcoholism and despair, a place where dreams of a better life were absurd and worthy of venomous critique from his own father.

There is a prison," Alfred began grimly, "in a more ancient part of the world. A pit where men are thrown to suffer and die. But sometimes a man rises from that darkness. Sometimes the pit sends something back.

The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything. Just throw the switch.

reality. Death would have been preferable. She slid the glass back into the indentation it had made on her Pottery Barn catalog.

Dying, she thought, is the only way out of what is happening to me.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

Maybe it was always simple: Loss surrounds us. Who would deny it? We ourselves are loss, are lost.

Someone was going to want to say, I'm fucked.

The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Lately I've had to redefine the word "knowledge" to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I'm dealing not in careless absurdities here but in the way material reality is unobservable and implicit order can be found in paradox. Perhaps despair is the only human sin. Who am I to feel disappointment? Is a bird disappointed in the sky

The only real laughter comes from despair.