Action is the antidote to despair.
-Joan Baez
All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world
were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the
breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
-Lenny Bruce
And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope
and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
-Boris Pasternak
Anyone who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a
penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the
reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems.
-Ellen
Key
As long as a man's heart beats, as long as a man's flesh quivers, I do
not allow that a being gifted with thought and will can allow himself to
despair.
-Jules Verne
At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it-
but I did I bear it. The question remains: how?
-Heinrich Heine
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its
worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it
happily.
-Flannery O'Connor
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to
reject despair.
-Elie Wiesel
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
-Matthew Arnold
Believe flatterers and you're lost; believe your enemies- and you
despair.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of
hope.
-Bernard Berenson
But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the
undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this- that
men despair and think things impossible.
-Francis Bacon
Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case
we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
-Diane
de Poitiers
Despair is anger with no place to go.
-Mignon McLaughlin
Despair is sometimes the great energizer of the mind, though sometimes
its flowering may be sterile.
-Taylor Caldwell
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
-Benjamin Disraeli
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.
-Graham
Greene
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.
-Franz
Kafka
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the
heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through
the awful grace of God.
-Aeschylus
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even
from the cliffs of despair.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
God does not send us despair in order to kill us, he sends it in order
to awaken us to new life.
-Hermann Hesse
I believe that a person should take an affirmative outlook. There are
always problems in life, old and new, uncertainties, and unexpected
contingencies. The optimal way to deal with this is not to give up in
despair, but to move ahead using the best intelligence and resources
that we have to overcome adversity.
-Paul Kurtz
I can endure my own Despair But not another's Hope.
-William Walsh
I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a
mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are
creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.
-Joseph Conrad
I do not despair for our country. I never do. I believe, as I always
have, the essential decency and compassion and common sense of the
American people will prevail.
-Jimmy Carter
I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.
-Alfred
Lord Tennyson
I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.
-John
Perry Barlow
If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I would not
despair over her. But if I had a son who became a journalist and
continued to remain one for five years, I would give him up.
-Søren
Kierkegaard
If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need,
then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
-J.B.
Priestley
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for
comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and
wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
-C.S. Lewis
In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world
filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with
despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with
distrust, we must still dare to believe.
-Michael Jackson
In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for
ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.
-J.R.R.
Tolkien
It (marriage) happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get
in, and those within despair of getting out.
-Michel de Montaigne
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair.
As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
-Charles
Baudelaire
It is often when night looks darkest, it is often before the fever
breaks that one senses the gathering momentum for change, when one feels
that resurrection of hope in the midst of despair and apathy.
-Hillary
Rodham Clinton
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too,
can be given to one only by other human beings.
-Elie Wiesel
Life begins on the other side of despair.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral
reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the
cultivated man rapidly to despair.
-Primo Levi
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief
and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet
stage.
-Peggy Noonan
Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
-Edmund Burke
Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate
bliss.
-Alexandre Dumas
Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of
despair.
-Erich Fromm
Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to
accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by
degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance.
-Theodore
Dalrymple
Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more
threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair
has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the
powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.
-Henri Nouwen
Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
-Ambrose
Bierce
Remember that despair is never the solution. Remember, hatred is never
an option. Remember that hope is not a gift given to us, hope is a gift
that we give to others.
-Elie Wiesel
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes;
that is always a sign of despair in a woman.
-Oscar Wilde
Sins become more subtle as you grow older. You commit sins of despair
rather than lust.
-Piers Paul Read
The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.
-Harry
Ruby
The initial expression of defiance is precisely despair over one's
weakness.
-Søren Kierkegaard
The machinery chugs on unabated, belching out its dehumanizing product.
It is distressing. But I refuse to despair. I know, one day, the Supreme
Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently.
-William J.
Brennan, Jr.
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and
usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than
the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he
sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a
good citizen driven to despair.
-H.L. Mencken
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
-Flannery
O'Connor
The words 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,' which I saw on an Italian movie poster,
are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of
movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us
despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.
-Pauline
Kael
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first
moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is
to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered
hope.
-George Eliot
Those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the
rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare
mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.
-Florence King
To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the
last word.
-Cornel West
Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings
have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we
should not... indulge in the luxury of 'privileged despair.'
-Kenneth
Tynan
What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody
dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more
congenial- or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God
and I will really begin to despair.
-Peter De Vries
When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair
and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.
-Giovanni Casanova
When too many Americans don't vote or participate, some see apathy and
despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out
of this frustration can come hope and action.
-Paul Wellstone
Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.
-William
Gaddis
Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare; To-morrow's Silence, Triumph,
or Despair: Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! for
you know not why you go, nor where.
-Omar Khayyám
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your
self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as
your despair.
-Douglas MacArthur
You are never stronger... than when you land on the other side of
despair.
-Zadie Smith
Categories: Despair
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