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.
