I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

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

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

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.

When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair, there is no hope.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Life is filled with detours and dead ends, trials and challenges of every kind. Each of us has likely had times when distress, anguish, and despair almost consumed us.

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.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

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.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations – wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

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?

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.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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

Despair is the conclusion of fools.