Despair Quotes - Page 30

• Evan Handler is a man who’s looked into the abyss and laughed. His book, It’s Only Temporary, made me laugh along with him. He covers love, lust, showbiz, triumph, and despair – and he manages to be both funny and inspiring about all of it. It’s an important book that I think can help to spread goodness around the world. Something we desperately need.

  Lance Armstrong

  Book, Thinking, Men

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• The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation... ...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Hurt, Deception, Impossible

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• ...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Giving, Victory

  The Sound and the Fury pt. 2 (1929)

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• Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dream, Morning, Memories

  Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (2004). “Aleph and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world.

  Hermann Hesse

  Order, Perfection, Soul

  "Siddhartha: An Indian Tale".

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• Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

  Blaise Cendrars

  Serenity, Soul, World

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• There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Evil, World, Today

  Evelyn Waugh (1958). “Vile Bodies”, p.7, Obelix Books

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• ...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Habit

  Albert Camus (1960). “The plague: translated from the French”

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• The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve 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

  Country, Hate, Patriotism

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• I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214

  Melody Beattie

  Simple, Trying, Ladders

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• Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.

  e. e. cummings

  Hands, Mountain, Depth

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• All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Grief, Sacrifice, Reality

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• When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

  Blaise Pascal

  Atheist, Mean, Sleep

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• The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

  John Steinbeck

  War, Believe, Heart

  John Steinbeck (2003). “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction”, p.146, Penguin

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• Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

  Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

  Dog, Miracle, Luck

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• When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Thinking, Atheism

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.112, Wordsworth Editions

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• She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.

  Holly Black

  Touching, Desire, Felt

  Holly Black (2012). “Ironside”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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• We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan

  Amy Tan

  Wish, Unbearable, Misery

  Amy Tan (2006). “The Joy Luck Club”, p.24, Penguin

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• A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Fashion, Grief, Heart

  Lloyd Alexander (2014). “The High King: The Chronicles of Prydain”, p.81, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

  Mitch Albom

  Mistake, Heart, People

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• We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Growing Up, Children, Fall

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from Nov 03, 2016

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• A spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Spiritual, Desert, Emptiness

  "Papal Homily at Closing Mass in Sydney: 'May This 23rd World Youth Day Be Experienced as a New Upper Room'". Speech by Pope Benedict XVI given at the World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia, www.catholic-church.org. July 19, 2008.

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• ...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

  Louise Bogan

  Heart, Giving, World

  Louise Bogan (1970). “A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

  Joanna Macy

  Flower, Emotional, Psychics

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• Market moralities and mentalities-- fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost-- yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.

  Cornel West

  Wall, Loneliness, Lying

  Cornel West (1998). “Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America”, G K Hall & Company

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