Quotes

Quotes about Despair


Despair is a great incentive to honorable death. [Lat., Desperatio magnum ad honeste moriendum incitamentum.]

Quintus Curtius Rufus (Curtis Rufus Quintus)

Discomfort guides my tongue And bids me speak of nothing but despair.

William Shakespeare

But, O thou tyrant, Do not repent these things, for they are heavier Than all thy woes can stir. Therefore betake thee To nothing but despair.

William Shakespeare

He who has never hoped can never despair.

William Shakespeare

. . . then black despair The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Action is the antidote to despair.

Joan Baez

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a cross-roads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

Despair ruins some, presumption many.

Benjamin Franklin

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall—think of it, ALWAYS.

Mahatma Gandhi

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

Charles Baudelaire

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Graham Greene

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

George Eliot

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

Elie Wiesel

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.

George Eliot

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

William M. Thackeray

The fact that God has prohibited despair gives misfortune the right to hope all things, and leaves hope free to dare all things.

Anne Sophie Swetchine

It becomes no man to nurse despair, but, in the teeth of clenched antagonisms, to follow up the worthiest till he die.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The man who lives only by hope will die with despair.

Italian Proverb

What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

George Eliot

Despair is like forward children, who, when you take away one of their playthings, throw the rest into the fire for madness. It grows angry with itself, turns its own executioner, and revenges its misfortunes on its own head.

Pierre Charron

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

Benjamin Disraeli

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation ... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Miguel de Menander

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

Menander Of Athens

Oft expectation fails and most oft there Where most it promises, and oft it hits Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

William Shakespeare

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