Despair Quotes

The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, toeven the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down.

~ Stephen Crane

the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair

~ Rohinton Mistry

Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from “problems”, but from his own inner torment and fire. It’s a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart!

~ Emil M. Cioran

Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.

~ Paul Tillich

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil...who put darkness for light and light for darkness...who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight. Issiah 5:20,21

~ Nikki Rosen

Phury knelt beside him and stroked his face. I've only ever had you to live for. If you die I have nothing.I'm utterly lost. And you are needed here. Zsadist tried to reach out, but couldn't lift his arms as Phury stood up. God, Z, I keep thinking this tragedy of ours is going to be over. But it just keeps going, doesn't it? Zsadist blacked out to the sound of his twin's boots heading from the room.

~ J.r. Ward

A person whom lives by faith is not bound to feel hopelessness or the agony of infinite despair.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Never lose hope.Never lose faith.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The news that gives you a future with hope, in spite of your despair over the past, is realizing that Jesus has prayed for you and is praying for you now.

~ William P. Barker

Could one that's damned stand in high Heaven, even thereHe'd feel within himself all Hell and Hell's despair.

~ Angelus Silesius

In a world where people are too languid to make something of themselves out of effort, I sell them hope. What they do with it is up to them. Invariably they drink it and then hurl it down a gutter, but that’s their choice and their freedom. I won’t judge them.

~ E.a.a. Wilson

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen.

~ Primo Levi

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.

~ Yann Martel

It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.

~ Cynthia Ozick

Times moves differently down here in the dark. With no sunlight or shadows. No weather at all. There's no future, no right now. Nothing but your memory to keep you company. But they keep me so angry and weak. I can barely think straight. How long have I been locked up...wuuks? months? I don't even konow how I got to this place. There are times I don't even know who I am anymore.

~ Scott Snyder

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

~ George Eliot

Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me: but sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Life—life—how cruel it is! Nothing but tears and sorrow and despair! Not a moment of happiness! Not a moment of joy.

~ Aimée Dostoyevsky

Sorrow is God's plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents of Divine joy would be the normal force to open up all our souls' capacities; but in a fallen world, sorrow, with despair taken out of it, is the chosen power to reveal ourselves to ourselves. Hence it is sorrow that makes us think deeply, long, and soberly.

~ Lettie B. Cowman

I can still hear the screams. They wake me in the night. Terrible, gut wrenching, painful screams; screams that can only come from the deepest and darkest recesses of the mind. These were not screams of pain. These were screams of years of sorrow and despair. These were screams that made your skin crawl. These were the worst screams I have ever heard. I cannot get them out of my head. Perhaps, they will be with me forever. I shouldn't be so lucky.

~ Jamie Schoffman

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

~ Voltaire

If you response to every demand, you will be in despair.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that, and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.

~ Anne Rice

Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighborhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful!

~ Elif Shafak

The only real laughter comes from despair.

~ Groucho Marx

The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Sometimes...you can cry until there's nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared.

~ Jhonen Vásquez

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?

~ Mervyn Peake

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

~ Khaled Hosseini

the thing is you can get used to anything you think you cant you want to die but you dont you cant you just are

~ Elizabeth Scott

The tears that kept Buttercup company the remainder of the day were not at all like those that had blinded her into the tree trunk. Those were noisy and hot; they pulsed. These were silent and steady and all they did was remind her that she wasn’t good enough. She was seventeen, and every male she’d ever known had crumbled at her feet and it meant nothing. The one time it really mattered, she wasn’t good enough.

~ William Goldman

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.-white oleander

~ Janet Fitch

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

~ Walker Percy

Whether you are man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or free, happy or unhappy; whether you bore in your elevation the splendour of the crown or in humble obscurity only the toil and heat of the day; whether your name will be remembered for as long as the world lasts, and so will have been remembered as long as it lasted, or you are without a name and run namelessly with the numberless multitude; whether the glory that surrounded you surpassed all human description, or the severest and most ignominious human judgment was passed on you -- eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether so in despair that you did not know that you were in despair, or in such a way that you bore this sickness concealed deep inside you as your gnawing secret, under your heart like the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that, a terror to others, you raged in despair. If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to yourself in despair!

~ Søren Kierkegaard

I cannot do it. I cannot bear it. I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong or that good.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.

~ William Shakespeare

It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion

~ Jacqueline Carey

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

~ Neil Gaiman