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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"Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere."
"I despair about the lack of proper respect shown for the piano. If you want it to sound like a traffic jam, go out in the street and forget the piano. That's not a piano sound."
"My only hope lies in my despair."
"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair."
"Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."
"We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection."
"I'm getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but... I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me."
"To despair over one's sins indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good, does not want to be so weak as to listen occasionally to other talk. No, it insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin."
"You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair."
"Without dreams, there could be no despair."
"She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear."
"A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind."
"On top of the world, or in the depths of despair."
"To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on."
"I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction."
"There is no love of life without despair of life."
"Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth."
"There are circumstances in which despair does not imply inactivity."
"If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time. As the years passed, he fell into despair and lost all hope. For who could ever learn to love a beast? -Beauty & the Beast"
"I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; And if I die no soul will pity me: And wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity to myself?"
