Hopelessness Quotes - Page 3

• So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die-yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life, Hope, Sick

  Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “Sickness Unto Death”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

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• That feeling of hopelessness and racism has been looming over Detroit ever since I was a kid.

  Robert Hood

  Kids, Racism, Feelings

  Source: thequietus.com

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• The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

  Carl Sagan

  Running, Dream, Self Esteem

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.464, Ballantine Books

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• Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Weakness, Born, Female Education

  "Malala Up Close: A Heroine And A Joking Teenager". "Morning Edition" with Renee Montagne, www.npr.org. October 2, 2015.

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• In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"-and the light shineth in the darkness.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Morning, Light, Darkness

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.37, Beacon Press

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• I'm tempted to say that the top three reasons for hopelessness are rejection, rejection, rejection. But let's cast our net wider. 1) Not being able to write as well as we hoped we could. 2) Not being able to write at all. 3) Rejection.

  Ralph Keyes

  Writing, Rejection, Three

  Source: writerunboxed.com

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• Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

  Samuel Johnson

  Hope, Schemes, Merriment

  'The Idler' no. 58 (26 May 1759)

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• Plenty of people are onto the emptiness but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

  Michael Shannon

  Real, People, Emptiness

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• Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

  Abraham Pais

  Liars, Believe, Writing

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• Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Spring, Grief, Heart

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2017). “The Brothers Karamazov (English Russian Edition illustrated): Братья Карамазовы (англо-русская редакция иллюстрированная)”, p.106, Clap Publishing, LLC.

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• We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.

  Saul Alinsky

  Dream, Lying, Believe

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• Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.

  Pema Chodron

  Buddhism, Squares, Suffering

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• A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

  Pauline Kael

  Believe, Cities, Good Movie

  1970 Going Steady.

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• Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

  Mary Oliver

  Laughter, Giving Up, Crazy

  Mary Oliver (2012). “A Thousand Mornings: Poems”, p.11, Penguin

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• It is ignorance that is at times incomprehensible to the wise; for instance, he may not see 'the positive person' or 'the negative person' in a black and white way as many people do. A wise man may not understand it because, as a catalyst of wisdom, but not wise in his own eyes, even he can learn from and give back to fools. To think that an individual has absolutely nothing to offer to the table is counter-intuitively what the wise man considers to be 'the ignorance of hopelessness'.

  Criss Jami

  Wise, Ignorance, Eye

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.19, Criss Jami

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• It's almost as difficult to believe that someone with so many trials could harbor such hope, as that there are those with so much advantage who harbor such hopelessness.

  Richard Paul Evans

  Believe, Trials, Advantage

  Richard Paul Evans (2012). “Miles to Go: The Second Journal of the Walk Series”, p.305, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Woody Allen

  Men, Healthy, Despair

  Side Effects "My Speech to the Graduates" (1980)

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• The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

  Robert Cormier

  Hate, Flower, Opposites

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• Answer hopelessness with a defiant smile and a raised middle finger.

  Daniele Bolelli

  Answers, Middle Finger, Fingers

  FaceBook post by Daniele Bolelli from Aug 12, 2014

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• Fear is a habit, so is self pity, defeat, anxiety, despair, hopelessness and resignation. You can eliminate all of these negative habits with two simple resolves: I can and I will.

  Napoleon Hill

  Inspirational, Fear, Simple

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• This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.

  Anne Lamott

  Thinking, People, World

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• The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.

  Philip K. Dick

  Love, Girl, Real

  Philip K. Dick (2008). “Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s”

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• But difficult situations and wrong choices conspire to trap us in hopelessness.

  Judah Smith

  Difficult Situations, Choices, Traps

  Judah Smith (2013). “Jesus Is: Find a New Way to Be Human”, p.30, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -

  Jack Kerouac

  Spiritual, Moving, Book

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• I found that my wounds begin to heal when the voices of those endangered by silence are given power. The silence of hopelessness, of despair buried in the depths of poverty, violence, racism are more deadly than bullets. The gift of light, in our compassion, our listening, our works of love is the gift of life to ourselves.

  Janice Mirikitani

  Love Is, Compassion, Light

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