Despair quotes

Despair

934 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

934 quotes

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Despair quotes (page 4 of 47)

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Adrienne Rich Poet, Essayist, Feminist
Despair

"Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair."

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Samuel Johnson Lexicographer, Essayist, Critic
Despair

"Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast."

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Sonny Rollins Jazz Musician
Despair

"I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress...so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair."

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Anne Lamott Author, Essayist
Despair

"The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable."

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Marcel Proust Novelist
Despair

"... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely."

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Ludwig van Beethoven Composer, Pianist
Despair

"such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, - ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I had felt called upon to produce."

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Bruce Dickinson Musician, Author, Pilot
Despair

"The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan - what's she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair."

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Timothy Keller Pastor, Author
Despair

"Rejoicing and repentance must go together. Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change."

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Friedrich Nietzsche Philosopher, Writer
Despair

"Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'."

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