1.
Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remained closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied.
Shams Tabrizi
2.
People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.
Soren Kierkegaard
Individuals accept a degree of gloom they can endure and dub it contentment.
3.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Soren Kierkegaard
The most prevalent type of despondency is denying one's true identity.
4.
Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect
Frantz Fanon
Destruction is an invigorating force. It liberates the native from his inadequacy and despondency; it emboldens him and reinstates his self-esteem.
5.
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.
Howard Thurman
In the hushed stillness, if we lend an ear, we can discern the gentle murmur of the heart bolstering frailty, bestowing boldness upon dread, and instilling expectation into despondency.
6.
Religion is man-made to assist in controlling the weak minded individuals because during times of atrocity and despair they feel strength in numbers.
Benito Mussolini
7.
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.
Saul Alinsky
Revive the disenchantment to drive revolutionary alteration.
8.
I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.
Leonard Cohen
I welcome you from the depths of mourning and desolation, with a boundless and splintered affection that will touch your heart in every corner.
9.
Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.
Martin Heidegger
10.
Remember, thou canst be brought into no condition, be it ever so severe, where Love has not been before thee and where its tender lesson is not awaiting thee. Therefore despair not nor murmur, for that which seeketh to save, to heal, and to deliver, will guide thee, if thou seekest this guidance.
Mary Baker Eddy
11.
Don’t despair if your heart has been through a lot of trauma. Sometimes that’s how beautiful hearts are remade: they are shattered first.
Yasmin Mogahed
'Do not be disheartened if your emotions have been through much anguish. This is often the way that exquisite hearts are crafted: they must be broken first.'
12.
Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.
John Bowlby
13.
Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.
Bell Hooks
14.
We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.
Edward R. Murrow
15.
Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair.
Ieyasu Tokugawa
16.
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].
Simone de Beauvoir
17.
Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Werner Heisenberg
18.
Two criminals were crucified with Christ. One was saved; do not despair. One was not; do not presume.
Saint Augustine
19.
To be cheerful when others are in despair, to keep the faith when others falter, to be true even when we feel forsaken—all of these are deeply desired outcomes during the deliberate, divine tutorials which God gives to us—because He loves us. These learning experiences must not be misread as divine indifference. Instead, such tutorials are a part of the divine unfolding.
Neal A. Maxwell
20.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
William S. Burroughs
21.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
Elie Wiesel
22.
Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
Rollo May
23.
To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.
Jason Silva
24.
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith Wharton
25.
You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.
Joan Baez
26.
Don't envy those who make their wealth in an ungodly way. The wicked SEEM to prosper now and live without a care but they will spend eternity in terror and despair.
T. B. Joshua
27.
God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.
Hermann Hesse
28.
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain de Botton
29.
If you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.
Michele Bachmann
30.
No matter what, we always have the power to choose hope over despair, engagement over apathy, kindness over indifference, love over hate.
Cory Booker
31.
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
33.
The law was given to drive us to despair over the hopelessness of ever being able to keep it.
Hal Lindsey
34.
If you knew that hope and despair were paths to the same destination, which would you choose?
Robert Breault
35.
All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
Lenny Bruce
36.
Bid me despair, and I'll despair,Under that cypress tree;Or bid me die, and I will dareE'en Death, to die for thee.
Robert Herrick
37.
Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
Diane de Poitiers
38.
No, my heart will not yet despair. Gandalf fell and has returned and is with us. We may stand, if only on one leg, or at least be left still upon our knees.
J. R. R. Tolkien
39.
Worshiping God even amid despair is a way to defy the Adversary and declare our valuing of the good-the best-in life: the Lord!
Jack W. Hayford
40.
We never gave up. We didn't get lost in a sea of despair. We kept the faith. We kept pushing and pulling. We kept marching. And we made some progress.
John Lewis
41.
We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.
Michael Jackson
42.
The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.
Terry Tempest Williams
43.
It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
J. R. R. Tolkien
44.
Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.
William Dunbar
45.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Soren Kierkegaard
46.
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
Irvin D. Yalom
47.
If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
J. B. Priestley
48.
Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don't know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another's. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone else. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself.
Tracey Emin
49.
... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
50.
To doubt is worse than to have lost; And to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.
Philip Massinger