These despair quotes will inspire you. Despair, a feeling of complete hopelessness or the complete loss or absence of hope.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging despair quotes, despair sayings, and despair proverbs.
Best Despair Quotes
- “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “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
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“Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.” ~ Rollo May
- “Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair.” ~ Thomas Hobbes , Despair quotes hope
- “Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.” ~ Albert Camus
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“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” ~ H. G. Wells
- “We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.” ~ Cesar Chavez
- “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 curing, not healing…that is a friend who cares.” ~ Henri Nouwen
- “I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.” ~ Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
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“Despair has its own calms.” ~ Bram Stoker
- “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
- “We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “He who has resolved to conquer or die is seldom conquered; such noble despair perishes with difficulty.” ~ Pierre Corneille
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“Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.” ~ Sir Fulke Greville
- “From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.” ~ Cesar Chavez
- “A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
- “Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
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“It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.” ~ J. R. R. Tolkien
- “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Despair makes a despicable figure, and descends from a mean original. ‘Tis the offspring of fear, of laziness and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and oftentimes of honesty, too. I would not despair unless I saw misfortune recorded in the book of fate, and signed and sealed by necessity.” ~ Jeremy Collier
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“Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.” ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
- “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 , Sorrow & despair quotes
- “All hope is lost of my reception into grace; what worse? For where no hope is left, is left no fear.” ~ John Milton
- “To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.” ~ Mikhail Bakunin
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“Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.” ~ David Livingstone
- “No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.” ~ Mario Vargas Llosa
- “My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.” ~ Peggy Noonan
- “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
- “I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike.” ~ Mother Jones
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“Despair often breeds disease.” ~ Sophocles
- “Despair of ever being saved, “except thou be born again,” or of seeing God “without holiness,” or of having part in Christ except thou “love him above father, mother, or thy own life.” This kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven.” ~ Richard Baxter
- “Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.” ~ Gautama Buddha
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“There is no love of life without despair of life.” ~ Albert Camus
- “All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.” ~ Ezra Pound
- “Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.” ~ Ben Okri
- “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
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“Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven.” ~ John Donne
- “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. 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
- “I can endure my own despair, but not another’s hope.” ~ William Walsh
- “The next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering—yours, mine, and that of all living beings.” ~ Pema Chodron
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“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” ~ Francis of Assisi
- “Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.” ~ Alexandre Dumas
- “I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.” ~ Henry Miller
- “We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Despair ruins some, presumption many.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “The accidents of life separate us from our dearest friends, but let us not despair. God is like a looking glass in which souls see each other. The more we are united to Him by love, the nearer we are to those who belong to Him.” ~ Elizabeth Ann Seton
- “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.” ~ George Eliot
- “The fact that God has prohibited despair gives misfortune the right to hope all things, and leaves hope free to dare all things.” ~ Bill Vaughan
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“There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “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
- “So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.” ~ Antonin Artaud
- “Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they’re willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies.” ~ John Shelby Spong
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“He who has never hoped can never despair” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!” ~ Pierre Corneille
- “To doubt is worse than to have lost; And to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.” ~ Philip Massinger
- “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
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“Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.” ~ Charlie Chaplin
- “It is only when you despair of all ordinary means, it is only when you convince it that it must help you or you perish, that the seed of life in you bestirs itself to provide a new resource.” ~ Robert Collier
- “I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.” ~ Joseph Addison
- “I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.” ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
