To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
When human hearts break and human hearts despair, then from the twilight of the past the great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down on them and hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals.
Rage is for little wrongs; despair is dumb.
Hope is a lover's staff; walk hence with that And manage it against despairing thoughts.
It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.
Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.
At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it — but I did I bear it. The question remains: how?
Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life from one moment to the next. But there's the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.
It was the lowest point of my life. I just kept thinking, 'What have I done to deserve this?' I didn't see the point in living.
Just another lonely broken hero picking up the pieces of my mind. Running out of faith and hope and reason, I'm running out of time.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.
Dear Pope, send me some hope or a rope.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.
I looked at the ceiling and wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries. That's what Wire man says.
It didn’t and doesn’t turn out well. There is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It’s only a matter of how long you can live with it.
It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion
Into every life there come the painful, despairing days of adversity and buffeting. There seems to be a full measure of anguish, sorrow, and often heartbreak for everyone, including those who earnestly seek to do right and be faithful. ... In this way the soul can become like soft clay in the hands of the Master.
And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end.
Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.
It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
