Top 87 Human Despair Quotes
#1. It's that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair.
David Foster Wallace
#2. 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
#3. Eph 4:9 The fact that he ascended confirms his victorious descent into the deepest pits of human despair. [In John 3:13: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, even the son of man." All mankind originates from above; we are anouthen, from above.
Francois Du Toit
#4. You start to feel panic, because you realise that human beings are possessed by the idea that they must fill the world with objects and ideas that will outlive them, and you suddenly glimpse the fires that burn below human despair.
Greg Baxter
#5. To be human is to seek beauty, Shallan. Do not despair, do not end the hunt because thorns grow in your way.
Brandon Sanderson
#6. To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
Charlie Chaplin
#7. My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties.
Khalil Gibran
#8. The human mind was very clever at tricking itself, at keeping the despair of inevitability at bay.
Brandon Sanderson
#9. And now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear-shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying. It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at the darkest.
Cressida Cowell
#10. A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration
Sylvia Plath
#11. My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.
Stanislaw Lem
#12. Nobody needs to be taken to Hell to experience it. We just grow despair inside the soul until it becomes a world in and around a human.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
#13. Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
H.G.Wells
#14. This, however, is OKCupid, the vast, weird pink-and-blue toned jungle of the id masquerading as a dating site, where rare birds of modern romance flutter amongst the night-terrors of human loneliness and despair and the suspicious skin irritants of late-night hook-uppery.
Laurie Penny
#15. The journey is made up of the most genuine and honest wonders of the mind, but also includes unfathomable sorrow and despair; yet, this is what makes up a journey as well as the human experience in entirety.
Forrest Curran
#16. Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.
John Ortberg
#17. I've learned that next to the atomic bomb, the greatest danger is defeatism, despair, and inadequate awareness of what human beings possess. I feel that any problem that can be defined is capable of being resolved. Out of this has come my conviction that no person knows enough to be a pessimist.
Norman Cousins
#18. Trust is an illusion meant to wrap one in a false sense of belief, in that moment of realization will despair ultimately set in.
Lolah Runda
#19. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently from the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#20. So great has been the endurance, so incredible the achievement, that, as long as the sun keeps a set course in heaven, it would be foolish to despair othe human race.
Ernest Llewellyn Woodward
#21. This was made for you, I think. For the person you're going to become.
A weapon to fight Death, in its form as the shadow of despair that falls on human minds and drains away their hope for the future.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#22. She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?
Yukio Mishima
#23. The human body is much stronger than we think. It seems to laugh at the cobwebs of despair that the heart weaves before our eyes in order to blind us to our fate. The body walks and goes on walking.
Consuelo De Saint-Exupery
#24. When human hearts break and human hearts despair, then from the twilight of the past the great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down on them and hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals.
Adolf Hitler
#25. We all know about love, faith, sadness, despair, hope, hopelessness, longing, desire ... those are things we all have inside of us, and that's what my songs are about ... what it means to be a human being.
Ron Pope
#26. The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs' relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair.
Ransom Riggs
#27. No one seems to realize how much we are driven by FEAR, the essential component of human personality. Everything else - from ambition to love to despair - derives in some way from this single powerful emotion.
Trenton Lee Stewart
#28. The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.
Charles W. Chesnutt
#29. Betrayal was the greatest of all crimes, for it took all that was human within a person and made it a thing of pain. In the face of that, murder itself was surcease: it was quick, and it ended the anguish and despair of a life without hope.
Steven Erikson
#30. We live forever by the grace of human love, which rocked strange children in their cradles and did not despair and did not turn away.
Cassandra Clare
#31. Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair.
Henry Fielding
#32. To have despair is human ... for we all have problems that at times burden us.
To rise above your trials and tribulations, sadness, suffering and heart aches is above human and quite divine!
Timothy Pina
#33. Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#34. In the end, the innate desire of all people for truth, justice, and human understanding must triumph over ignorance and despair.
Dalai Lama XIV
#35. When there was nothing left to gain, nothing more to lose, when one was face-to-face with the moment of greatest despair, to speak to God in love and thanks, rather than to curse Him and one's fate, was the ultimate choice of any human creature, and perhaps the ultimate expression of one's humanity.
Naomi Ragen
#36. No matter how bad things become, they will eventually get better. In the end, the innate desire of all people for truth, justice and human understanding must triumph over ignorance and despair. So if the Chinese oppressed us, it could only strengthen us
Dalai Lama XIV
#37. It is something to remember, if we feel distant from humans," Catarina said. "We owe a great deal to human love. We live forever by the grace of human love, which rocked strange children in their cradles and did not despair and did not turn away. I know which side of my heritage my soul comes from.
Cassandra Clare
#38. I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.
Erwin McManus
#39. Uncertainty! fell demon of our fears! The human soul that can support despair, supports not thee.
David Mallet
#40. We bring the holy things of the church onto the holy streets of the city because on some level, the violence and despair of Good Friday is still a human reality. Unfortunately, we've never lacked an opportunity to pay such a visit.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
#41. What was a prayer, if not creation? Making something where nothing existed. Creating a wish out of despair, a plea out of anguish. Bowing one's back before the Almighty, and forming humility from the empty pride of a human life.
Brandon Sanderson
#42. Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.
Robert Charles Wilson
#43. Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.
Giacomo Leopardi
#44. She wondered if the stars could sense the vibrations of human joy and wonder, of grief and despair.
Alison Croggon
#45. What is Hope?Hope is that inner dynamic that compels us to explore and pursue the expectations built into the human condition. Hope was born the day the first human beings discovered the first bridge and decided not to jump off the bridge in despair, but to cross it
Henri Nouwen
#46. Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.
Muhammad Yunus
#47. I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Elie Wiesel
#48. Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
Elie Wiesel
#49. We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.
Albert Einstein
#50. To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
Wendell Berry
#51. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
Graham Greene
#52. We humans are imperfect, but what makes us human is not are kind but our courage to overcome fear, our ability to turn imagination into reality, our hope to diminish despair, and have a smile on our face although we in a predicament.
Paranjay Malkan
#54. [U]nder even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance.
Sandor Marai
#55. Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach?
Charlotte Bronte
#56. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast.
James Joyce
#57. Such is the uncertainty of human affairs, that security and despair are equal follies; and as it is presumption and arrogance to anticipate triumphs, it is weakness and cowardice to prog-nosticate miscarriages.
Samuel Johnson
#58. There is a hint of despair in the cry of 'I told you so,' an element of disappointment in the apparent satisfaction when idols turn out to have clay feet. The human race, when it thinks it has proved that no one is superior, is partly gratified and partly depressed.
Alice Thomas Ellis
#59. If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.
C. JoyBell C.
#61. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.
Rollo May
#62. Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.
Saul Bellow
#63. Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.
Robert Kennedy
#64. Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.
Rollo May
#65. Help me," I sobbed. "I beg you, help me." My eyes burned, but
no tears came. I had lost the basic human ability to weep. Human ... I
am no longer human. "Destroy me. Take pity and send me on my way.
Carol Oates
#66. Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies-hunger, misery, and despair.
Harry S. Truman
#67. In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.
Joanna Russ
#68. The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.
Dean Koontz
#69. You must think I don't know what's keeping you up at night. You must think we're so different. But I know. Everyone knows despair. Isn't that why people jump off bridges or drown themselves? Anything, really, to escape being human.
V.J. Campilan
#70. I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence.
Henry Miller
#71. The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.
Anne Rice
#72. Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of others those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.
Blaise Pascal
#73. In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done, and they will say 'do not despair, do not yield ... march straightforward.
Winston S. Churchill
#74. It was a white-collar crime."
Illium gave her an odd look. "In the human world, such crimes are lightly punished, though they harm hundreds, leading some to choose death out of despair, while the man who beats a single person is considered the worse criminal.
Nalini Singh
#75. If you think for one second no one knows what you've been going through; be accepting of the fact that you are wrong, that the long drawn and heavy breaths of despair have at times been felt by everyone - that pain is part of the human condition and that alone makes you a legion.
Shane Koyczan
#76. I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.
Studs Terkel
#78. Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair
Federico Garcia Lorca
#79. No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart.
Martin Sheen
#80. Angel screeched with fury and despair to the empty walls around her. I'm human, do you hear me? It hurts!
James Patterson
#81. Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.
Paul Tillich
#83. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.
Edith Wharton
#84. In the United States, there is no end which human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united in a society.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#85. Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#86. No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.
Theodore Parker
#87. We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality,
violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
