Despair quotes
934 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside despair — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible."
"The stockmarket is a semi-psychotic creature given to extremes of elation and despair."
"What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?"
"Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down."
"Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us."
"Despair and die. The ghosts"
"May never glorious sun reflex his beams Upon the country where you make abode! But darkness and the gloomy shade of death Environ you till mischief and despair Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves."
"There is no creature loves me; And if I die, no soul will pity me."
"Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low."
"Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair."
"Never flinch, never weary, never despair."
"More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man."
"Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
"Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only."
"I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps."
"The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions."
"I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters."
"Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away."
"Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves."
"There is message to the community that a non-governmental process is underway to bring about social change, it's a public one, and people like Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev are throwing their weight behind it. In a world where there's a lot of cynicism and despair, this has a candle-lighting effect."
