Despair Quotes

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.
Henri Nouwen

Friend, Healing, Confusion

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

Human, Humanity, Cannot

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.
C. S. Lewis

Truth, End, Thinking

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

God, Light, Darkness

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.
Thomas Jefferson

Hope, Dream, Theory

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.
John F. Kennedy

Trust, Future, Past

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.
Mahatma Gandhi

Love, Nature, Evil

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus

God, Wisdom, Pain

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
Pope John Paul II

Easter, Song, Abandon

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.
Albert Camus

Beauty, Time, Whole

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert

Life, Success, Future

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal

God, Humble, Jesus

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
Samuel Johnson

Great, Strength, Impossible

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
H. G. Wells

Time, Future, Human

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

Father, May, Him

It is often when night looks darkest, it is often before the fever breaks that one senses the gathering momentum for change, when one feels that resurrection of hope in the midst of despair and apathy.
Hillary Clinton

Change, Hope, Night

Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
William Blake

Love, Care, Hell

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

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Love, Time, God

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world.
Jack Layton

Love, Change, Hope

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

Great, Hope, Sorrow

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
Edmund Burke

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

Hope, Often, Call

Despair is the conclusion of fools.
Benjamin Disraeli

Fools, Conclusion

Life begins on the other side of despair.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Life, Side, Begins

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
Honore de Balzac

Men, Die, While

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.
Chuck Palahniuk

Hope, Dark, Start

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Happiness, Joy, Spring

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.
Franz Kafka

Life, Down, Cannot

Despair gives courage to a coward.
Thomas Fuller

Courage, Coward, Gives

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Pliny the Elder

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