Action is the antidote to despair.
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.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
Despair gives courage to a coward.
Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
Despair is the only genuine atheism.
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.
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o clock in the morning, day after day.
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.
It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
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.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
Man dies of cold, not of darkness.
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.
Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.