Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Despair.
February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.
Albert Camus
It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.
Neil Gaiman
My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.
Willem de Kooning
Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
Eric Hoffer
Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.
Oscar Wilde
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Desperation is like stealing from the Mafia: you stand a good chance of attracting the wrong attention.
Doug Horton
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
Elie Wiesel
Make sense who may. I switch off.
Samuel Beckett
Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Why was I born with such contemporaries?
He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it.Will, she whispered. Say something, Will.But there was nothing to say. There was only emptiness, as there had been before her. As there would always be.'I have lost everything', Will thought. 'Everything.
Cassandra Clare
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Joseph Conrad
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, cha
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Katherine Anne Porter
Despair ruins some, presumption many
Benjamin Franklin
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.
Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov)
Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Thomas Jefferson
Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.
William Shakespeare
When the tide of life turns against youAnd the current upsets your boat,Don't waste tears on what might have been,Just lie on your back and float.
Anon.
