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When the tide of life turns against you
And the current upsets your boat,
Don't waste tears on what might have been,
Just lie on your back and float.
-Anon.
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The person who lives by hope will die by despair.
-Italian Proverb
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I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.
-Joseph Addison
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At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
-Maya Angelou
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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
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Action is the antidote to despair.
-Joan Baez
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Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
-Natalie Clifford Barney
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Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
-Georges Bataille
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Make sense who may. I switch off.
-Samuel Beckett
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Then my verse I dishonor, my pictures despise, my person degrade and my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; and my talents I bury, and dead is my fame.
-William Blake
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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
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To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
-Albert Camus
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The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.
-Leonard Cohen
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What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.
-Leonard Cohen
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Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss...
-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
-Joseph Conrad
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Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
-Andre Dubus
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But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
-George Eliot
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Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/obituaries.html
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
from Pasting it Together published in The Crack-Up, March, 1936
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Despair gives courage to a coward.
-Thomas Fuller
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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
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Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
-Gunther Grass
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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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Books about Despair
