Despair Quotes - Page 11

• That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.

  Lee Child

  Needs, Towns, Live Free

  Lee Child (2015). “The Essential Jack Reacher, Volume 1, 7-Book Bundle: Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, Bad Luck and Trouble, Nothing to Lose, Gone Tomorrow”, p.1362, Delacorte Press

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• Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.

  Janet Fitch

  Panic, Possibility, Worst

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.82, Hachette UK

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• Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  People, Unhappy, Trying

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• Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

  Graham Greene

  Animal, Mind, Instinct

  Graham Greene (1990). “The power and the glory”, Viking Pr

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• Faith reinvigorates the will, enriches the affections, and awakens a sense of creativeness. Active faith knows no fear, and it is a safeguard to me against cynicism and despair.

  Helen Keller

  Faith, No Fear, Affection

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• The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Pain, Doubt, Growth

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• If thy faith have no doubts, thou has just cause to doubt thy faith; and if thy doubts have no hope, thou hast just reason to fear despair; when therefore thy doubts shall exercise thy faith, keep thy hopes firm to qualify thy doubts; so shall thy faith be secured from doubts; so shall thy doubts be preserved from despair.

  Francis Quarles

  Faith, Exercise, Doubt

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• There are times when you are in despair, because in order not to betray who you are, you don't compromise, you don't make movies that would be very lucrative or prestigious or easily understood. And yet I stay attached to the most uncanny premises. It's never been easy.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Compromise, Easy, Betray

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• So use prosperity, that adversity may not abuse thee: if in the one, security admits no fears, in the other, despair will afford no hopes; he that in prosperity can foretell a danger can in adversity foresee deliverance.

  Francis Quarles

  Adversity, Abuse, May

  Francis Quarles (1844). “Enchiridion Institutions, Essays and Maxims, political, moral & divine. Divided into four centuries. By Francis Quarles”, p.43

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• A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Costumes, Necks

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• It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

  Honore de Balzac

  Beautiful, Grief, Ambition

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• Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Criminals, Keyholes

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• The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Sauntering, Streets

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• Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.

  Joseph Addison

  Generous Spirit, Cows, Poverty

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• I can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Sleep, Wish, Youth

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• Despair is sometimes the great energizer of the mind, though sometimes its flowering may be sterile.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Mind, May, Sometimes

  TAYLOR CALDWELL “THE SIDE OF INNOCENCE”

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• An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

  May Sarton

  Sex, Treasure, Body

  May Sarton (2014). “Recovering: A Journal”, p.95, Open Road Media

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• God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness.

  Leigh Hunt

  Laughter, Sorrow, Tears

  Leigh Hunt (1853). “The Religion of the Heart: A Manual of Faith and Duty”, p.62

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• We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

  Clarence Darrow

  Men, Prison, Blank

  Clarence Darrow (2015). “The Story of My Life”, p.90, Lulu.com

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• There is yet a silent agony in which the mind appears to disdain all external help, and broods over its distresses with gloomy reserve. This is the most dangerous state of mind; accidents or friendships may lessen the louder kinds of grief, but all remedies for this must be had from within, and there despair too often finds the most deadly enemy.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Grief, Agony, Mind

  Oliver Goldsmith (1854). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith”, p.342

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• Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

  Adrienne Rich

  Self, Numbness, Encounters

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• Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

  Blaise Pascal

  Passion, Heart, Sadness

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

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• There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerless, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair.

  Blaise Pascal

  Sadness, Passion, Men

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