Hopeless Quotes - Page 23

• Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.

  Norton Juster

  Names, Would Be, Four

  Norton Juster (2011). “The Phantom Tollbooth”, p.145, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• O Hope! Dazzling, radiant Hope! What a change thou bringest to the hopeless; brightening the darkened paths, and cheering the lonely way.

  Aimee Semple McPherson

  Change, Lonely, Cheer

  Aimee Semple McPherson (2009). “This is That: Personal Experiences Sermons and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson”, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.

  Thomas M. Disch

  Tasks, Would Be, Acquiescence

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• it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away.

  George Orwell

  Dream, Heart, Looks

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• One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hope, Able, Determined

  "Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940".

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• what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

  William S. Burroughs

  Spiritual, Hate, Stupid

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• In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

  Philip K. Dick

  War, Trying, Sides

  Philip K. Dick (1979). “Time Out of Joint”

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• So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

  Graham Greene

  Moving Forward, Writing, Shopping

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

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• Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Heart, Beloved, Paradox

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• There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.

  Zig Ziglar

  Attitude, People, Faces

  FaceBook post by Zig Ziglar from May 18, 2013

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• First of all, I swore it was two people playing. When I finally admitted to myself that was one man, I gave up the piano for a month. I figured it was hopeless to practice.

  Oscar Peterson

  Men, Piano, Practice

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• Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

  John Fowles

  Cancer, Love You, Fairy Stories

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

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• Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a
  hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond
  himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Inspirational, Fate, Challenges

  Viktor E. Frankl (2006). “Man's Search for Meaning”, p.142, Beacon Press

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• There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time

  Andre Breton

  Loving You, Secret, Fusion

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• This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Suicide, Country, Heart

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• We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

  Louise Erdrich

  Love Is, Healthy, Brain

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• Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

  Thomas Merton

  Religious, Writing, Artist

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

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• The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Music, Men, Mediocrity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.114, Courier Corporation

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• Some might tell you there's no hope in hand
  Just because they feel hopeless
  But you don't have to be a thing like that
  You be a ship in a bottle set sail

  Dave Matthews

  Hands, Bottles, Might

  Song: Baby, Album: Some Devil, 2003

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• Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Real, Giving, Waiting

  1925 Science and the Modern World.

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• I'm not hopeless, that's the problem. I'm too hopeful, if anything ... I'm so thick-headed it's taken me this long to give up on men, but I can't give up completely, you know? So I ... I channel all my hope into an idea, to someone who can't reject me because he isn't real!

  Shannon Hale

  Giving Up, Real, Taken

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• The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept.

  Lawrence Lessig

  War, Creativity, People

  WIPO Magazine Interview, www.wipo.int. February, 2011.

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• The soft complaining flute, In dying notes, discovers The woes of hopeless lovers.

  John Dryden

  Dying, Complaining, Woe

  John Dryden, John Mitford (1847). “The Works of John Dryden in Verse and Prose”, p.141

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• It is not cheerful for a girl to discover within twenty-four hours of her wedding that her husband is a hopeless drunkard, and to see him die of delirium tremens within six weeks. An experience so vivid, like lightning must blast something in a woman's conception of life. Because one man's kisses reeked of whisky the kisses of all male humanity were anathema.

  William John Locke

  Girl, Husband, Kissing

  William John Locke (2012). “Septimus”, p.13, tredition

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• Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure.

  D. H. Lawrence

  D.H. Lawrence (2015). “D. H. Lawrence The Dover Reader”, p.126, Courier Dover Publications

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