Despair Quotes

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood. ~ The Awakening by Kate Chopin Up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. ~ Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville "Tut! tut!" cried Sherlock Holmes. "You must act, man, or you are lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for despair." ~ The Five Orange Pips by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. ~ Middlemarch by George Eliot For 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 to have recovered hope. ~ Adam Bede by George Eliot "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish'd by our virtues." ~ All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare The Disappointment of Manhood succeeds to the delusion of Youth: let us hope that the heritage of Old Age is not Despair. ~ Vivian Grey by Benjamin Disraeli You know that he came into his uncle's money a little time ago, and after a first delirious outbreak, he has now relapsed into that dead heavy state of despair which is caused by having everything which one can wish for. How absurd are the ambitions of life when I think that I, who am fairly happy and as keen as a razor edge, should be struggling for that which I can see has brought neither profit nor happiness to him! ~ The Stark Munro Letters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting. ~ The Man Upstairs by P. G. Wodehouse Despair has its own calms. ~ Dracula by Bram Stoker