Top 220 Despair Quotes

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, ‘Aha, here is the story.’

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don’t give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it’s always darkest before the dawn.

If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch – the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday – you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It’s always small, but it’s real.

The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn’t yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word ‘resolved,’ if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis – there would be only despair.

From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.

Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there’s poverty; there’s political repression; there’s gender apartheid – there’s a sense of culture loss; there’s religious fanaticism.

For many people, Christmas is indeed the most wonderful time of year. But the festive period can also bring its own unique stresses and strains. But don’t despair: there are solutions to many – if not all – of these issues.

I’ve found a different way to scent the air: already it’s a by-word for despair.

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

I am the despair of my accountant; I am the plastic bags of receipts.

It’s so much easier to count our disadvantages than tot up the mitigating circumstances that generally outweigh the despair.

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

In 1983, most Nicaraguans had still not fallen to the depths of deprivation and despair which they would reach in later years, but many were already unhappy and restive.

I would never write stories with only despair and defeat and the dark side of life.

Despair has its own calms.

I make it my business to see or do something cultural in every place I go to. If you don’t, you’ll get into a state of constant despair.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

‘Sin Nombre’ was almost like the adolescent version of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ‘Jane Eyre’ sort of picks up where ‘Sin Nombre’ ends. It’s about this girl who starts off on her own at her lowest point of despair, and she figures out how she got there.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

I have seen (as far as it can be seen) many persons changed in a moment from the spirit of horror, fear, and despair to the spirit of hope, joy, peace; and from sinful desires, till then reigning over them, to a pure desire of doing the will of God.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.

The whole government publicity situation has everybody in the news business almost in despair, with half a dozen agencies following different lines.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

Unprecedented financial pressures, and an ever-increasingly aggressive public culture, along with social, moral and spiritual fragmentation, are leading to lives being overwhelmed by stress, intolerable interior isolation and even quiet despair.

When I’m sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it’s silence and despair! It’s not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

I didn’t want ‘BSG’ to have to rewrite Anders as a sniveling, whining ball of despair who’s hiding out in the corner.

Music is entertainment, and we need that in order not to fall into the pit of despair.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading ‘The Naked and the Dead’ made him despair of his own ‘confined talents.’

It’s curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

The upside of a downward spiral into despair and defeat in young adulthood is that pretty early on, I was forced to face not only the foolish things I had done but also the stark realization that there was likely no end to what I was capable of doing.

Despair gives courage to a coward.

Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.

For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.

I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.

I was a late developer. For years, I was searching. I was a lost soul something your parents despair of and your peers deride. It isn’t at all happy trying to find the right career.

Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven.

I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this – or else face utter despair.

I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I’ve written, but the next morning I see that it’s crap. Then I start again – make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question.

I have nothing against people having work done, it is when I hear tale of girls of 16 queuing up to get bigger breasts, that is when I despair.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.

Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they’re willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies.

It’s easy to lose sight of God when life is sweet and easy, but there is something awesome about despair, and it is the closeness of God when we are at our weakest.

It has never been, and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we’ve reached a point where we’ve discovered most of the things. I’m going tell you right now: Please don’t despair.

Every new industry has exuberance in advance of reality. The techies get carried away. There is a period of despair. Then the pendulum swings the other way, and people see the long term potential. It’s like when the Internet bubble crashed.

As a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, I understood all too well the despair my colleagues – Republican and Democrat alike – were feeling as Hurricane Sandy ravaged their communities.

Being alone with fear can rapidly turn into panic. Being alone with frustration can rapidly turn into anger. Being alone with disappointment can rapid turn into discouragement and, even worse, despair.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

No mother, or father, should despair over whether or not they can afford – or access – the health care their child needs.

A novel is something, while despair is nothing.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through.

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.

I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.

The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless.

I am pretty much as you see me. I don’t have deep, dark depths and go home in despair.

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China – the greatest and oldest despotism in the world – for a cheap working slave.

Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it, focusing instead on the short-term.

Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve convinced myself – I hope I’m right – that children despair of you if you don’t tell them the truth.

Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study.

He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

I am prone to despair. We are all born with a particular personality. I get afraid and then I don’t want to leave the house.

Shutting people away, cooped up in cramped accommodation, is a recipe for frustration and despair. It is impossible for families in one-bedroom flats to get space from each other. No garden, no balcony, no patio means little activity for children.

Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn’t go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.

Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don’t have enough of, or the right kind of. It’s an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.

Sometimes to go forward you’ve got to go to the depths of your own personal despair and claw yourself back. From that point, no matter what happens, you know you can do it.

It is necessary above all that the citizens, who have rallied round the constitution, should be assured that the rights it guarantees will be respected with such a scrupulous fidelity as will reduce to despair its enemies, hidden or avowed.

I tell you it’s no joke to paint a portrait. I wonder that I am not more timid when I begin. I feel almost certain that I can do it. It seems very simple. I don’t think of the time that is sure to come when I almost despair, when the whole thing seems hopeless.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

A lot of times, people think that it doesn’t make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They’re going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that’s true for everybody – I don’t care what color you are.

Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.

When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Every human – especially the most vulnerable, the unborn, the infirm, those ravaged by age and those desperate in despair – should be protected in law, loved, and told repeatedly of their incredible beauty and worth.

I came of age during AIDS and the terror of that and the sadness and the death and the overwhelming despair.

I suppose I’m interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

It is often when night looks darkest, it is often before the fever breaks that one senses the gathering momentum for change, when one feels that resurrection of hope in the midst of despair and apathy.

Panic moves you to despair and fear your neighbors.

Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.

Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing in the bread line – right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.

We’ve all had that fear, that despair of losing someone, or this fierce desire because it’s not reciprocated. The less reciprocation there is, the more desire we have.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.

A high-quality public education can build much-needed skills and knowledge. It can help children reach their God-given potential. It can stabilize communities and democracies. It can strengthen economies. It can combat the kind of fear and despair that evolves into hatred.

I don’t feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.

As a nation, we face a choice. With parts of the world on fire, can we ignore the despair beyond our borders? Or do we use our global influence and leadership to confront these challenges head-on?

For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

Having a wife and kids drove home the brutal reality of the slave system for me – the price it exacted on families. On the other hand, whenever I despair over our history, I am brought back to hope, the hope that things will get better, for my children.

Sin pulls a man down into despondency and despair.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

The year that ‘Lost’ started and premiered was, without a doubt, the most miserable year of my life. The level of despair and anguish that I was feeling; I was clinically depressed, and anyone that you talked to who knew me at the time will tell you that.

With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, ‘Studs, you’re an optimist.’ I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what’s the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fears; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

If September 11th has taught us anything, it’s certainly that the world has never been so interdependent. It is impossible now to be an island of prosperity in a sea of despair.

And there are a lot of people like that, who feel loneliness and despair but cover it up.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

As recently as the September 11 event, the majority of Muslims were, as the rest of the world was, against its violence. However, if despair and humiliation continue in the population of more than one billion Muslims, the world will face increasing risks of conflicts and wars.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

You don’t despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

With grief, you have reason to despair; it’s a human thing.

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

Stand up comedy is an odd way to make a living, one that is regularly tinged with both triumph and despair.

Despair often breeds disease.

It is not enough to tackle the mechanics of terror organizations. We must also tackle the situations that create terrorists. We desperately need to address the frustration, the loss and the despair that drive some to these actions.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.

You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it’s the worst decision in your life. That’s fine. That’s not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It’s a sign that it’s normal; it’s on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue.

Therefore, let us not despair, but instead, survey the position, consider carefully the action we must take, and then address ourselves to our common task in a mood of sober resolution and quiet confidence, without haste and without pause.

I believe I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which situations we find ourselves in. In despair, I would steal food if my children were hungry.

When I started doing music, it was out of despair and boredom. I got passionate about it, and I felt that it allowed me to become somebody: an artist who explores her different identities.

The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do ‘Things Have Changed,’ or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo’s ‘The David’ or that movie ‘Lost in Translation’ – it inspires me to try and find my own version of that.

As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

The best I can say is that it’s better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It’s better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

Despair is a cop-out, the ultimate abdication of all responsibility, in which people feel justified in their feelings of impotence. But if, on the other hand, you feel that your work in the world does make a difference and that you do have the power to change things, the nay-sayers will turn a deaf ear.

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

I’ve convinced myself – I hope I’m right – that children despair of you if you don’t tell them the truth.

When we contemplate the heroes of Christianity, and compare our feeble efforts with their astonishing performance and self devotion, we should fall into despair, were there not a few softening features, by which they are brought back to the ranks of humanity.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking.

Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.

I can wax boringly about the role of comedy in mitigating pain. For so many comedians, comedy comes out of personal despair. I’m not a very despairing person myself, but I do fear despair and the death of loved ones.

For members of the Democratic Party, and progressives all over the world, it is difficult to overstate or hyperbolize the despair and dread that has descended upon them in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump.

I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

I am president and do not have the right to give in to emotions. I have bad moods, very bad moods, but I never feel despair.

People think that when you’re connected with other people it’s more painful. The opposite is true. When you’re connected to the river you have despair, but you also have joy, and there’s a flow in the river.

If falling into desperation worked to make things better, then I would say, ‘Let’s all jump into despair.’ But it doesn’t help. The only way to truly find meaning and fulfillment is to look at the disaster, the pain, the difficulty, and know with complete certainty that good can come from this.

Do not let us despair of the cause of liberty: it is still dear to the hearts of Frenchmen, and we shall one day have the felicity of seeing it established in our beloved country.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Our family has always drawn on the power from above to comfort us in times of despair and stress.

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

A rabbi should not despair if people do not do as much as they should. Every parent has that with children. God is merciful.

No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart.

Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we’d like to admit. That’s just how it is. I don’t despair too much about dying, either. It’s just a fact of being human.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It’s not getting easier; if anything, it’s always right on the edge of my skin.

If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?

‘The Voice’ has lots of singers who fit the ‘Idol’ mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness.

There are always moments of despair when you get close to jobs and lose them at the last second. It feels like getting punched in the stomach. You feel like, ‘Why do I do this?’ Then you go to bed, get up the next day and forget about it.

It is my firm belief that I have a link with the past and a responsibility to the future. I cannot give up. I cannot despair. There’s a whole future, generations to come. I have to keep trying.

Single parenting is sometimes just a case of sitting around by yourself in mild despair, not knowing what to do.

Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.

With five chances on each hand and one unwavering aim, no boy, however poor, need despair. There is bread and success for every youth under the American flag who has energy and ability to seize his opportunity.

News-free existence is not a serious proposal, but it is worth noting that while today’s 24/7 media environment is wonderful in many ways, it can also be like drinking out of a fire hose and intensify a downward reinforcing cycle of despair.

Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn’t have to be something that is imbued with more despair.

‘Revelations’ is one of the most important pieces to the African American arts. It assesses the hope and despair of a people and overcoming the struggle with our faith.

My brother Steve was always considered the naughty one but I used to drive my parents to despair because I had no fear. Id climb a tree without testing the branches and I was always getting into scrapes.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

When I think of Hungarian films, I think of despair and bleakness, and what’s more, despair and bleakness of indefensible duration.

The writing of ‘Topdog’ was a great gift. I feel the play came to me because I realized that my circumstances, while causing me despair and heartbreak, also held great possibility, if only I could see it.

Then I despair… I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.

Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!

We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.

In these times of stress, snark, division and despair, I still suspect that two of the most important features we possess are imagination and a capacity for goodness. Those are qualities for which we will be remembered most fondly.

Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages – and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.

The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind’s best thoughts, and my soul’s triumph over the powers of darkness.

The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it’s the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that’s much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

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

When too many Americans don’t vote or participate, some see apathy and despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out of this frustration can come hope and action.

God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.

The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair.

Would not the child’s heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love?

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.

The chaos in our world may have brought you close to despair, but if you are willing to look at reasons for hope, perhaps you are ready for the ‘Aquarian Conspiracy.’

Life is filled with detours and dead ends, trials and challenges of every kind. Each of us has likely had times when distress, anguish, and despair almost consumed us.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

My primary goal is to eradicate poverty; I believe it is immoral and a stain on our society. And so when I despair or get angry, I take the time to think about how I can best achieve that goal – and then I get to work.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not be an endless preoccupation. You must dwell also on the glad remembrance of God’s loving-kindness; otherwise, sadness will harden the heart and lead it more deeply into despair.

There’s a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It’s a journey of discovery – there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.

There is a lot of suffering and injustice in the world, and there is also a great deal of hope. When you step forward and start speaking about what you see and what you want to change, you can begin living in that hope instead of despair.