Most Despairing Quotes

#1. The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears.

Alfred De Musset

#2. If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

Andre Breton

#3. I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

Roman Payne

#4. So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting?

Anne Rice

#5. The highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

Nikos Kazantzakis

#6. Many people are despairing of the possibility of finding love. And some of the people who are despairing the most are in their thirties and forties and looking just great.

Marianne Williamson

#7. A lot of actresses are doing incredible work right now, playing real women, complicated women. I don't feel despairing at all. And I'm more looking with hope for something fascinating.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

#8. For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus

#9. Low and grovelling thoughts of God must be given up; doubting and despairing must be removed; and self-seeking and carnal delights must be forsaken. Across these deep valleys a glorious causeway of grace must be raised.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#10. Hope is a lover's staff; walk hence with that
And manage it against despairing thoughts.

William Shakespeare

#11. I am pressed, but not broken. I am confused, but not despairing. I am hunted by the enemy but not abandoned by God. I have been thrown down, but I am not finished yet.

George Sousa

#12. I no longer scramble blindly through hardship. I no longer emerge from a bad time feeling relieved just to have survived. Instead of despairing, I try to find the lesson within the experience.

Halle Berry

#13. A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me
a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly

Charlotte Bronte

#14. Tremendous pride was exhibited in fascism, as everyone knows who has seen the pictures of the strutting Mussolini and psychopathic Hitler; but fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises.

Rollo May

#15. I don't think that people are disinterested or uninterested in politics. I think very often they are disengaged from the formal political process. To some extent they are suspicious or even despairing of formal politics as a means to give expression and effect to what they want.

John Bercow

#16. I hope that the kind reader recognises this as a despairing attempt at humour.

Nancy Springer

#17. I literally in the New York flea market - just when I was despairing of ever having a great serendipitous find - found a 1926 Chanel.

Hamish Bowles

#18. It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative
which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Sylvia Plath

#19. Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.

Virginia Woolf

#20. I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

Ben Lerner

#21. God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn't damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done.

John Connolly

#22. Powerful people doing bad things LIKE cynical, despairing citizens.

Alex Steffen

#23. Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world.

Thomas Cahill

#24. First, I thought, almost despairing,
This must crush my spirit now;
Yet I bore it, and am bearing-
Only do not ask me how.

Heinrich Heine

#25. Newman cast a despairing glance at his small store of fuel, but, not having the courage to say no-a word which in all his life he never had said at the right time, either to himself or anyone else-gave way to the proposed arrangement.

Charles Dickens

#26. The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent.

Anders Chydenius

#27. There's one thing which I hate about color films ... people who use up a lot of their despairing producer's money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color films where there isn't any color.

Claude Chabrol

#28. Now you watch the parades and processions of hopeful and despairing people walking outside your tomb. They are all looking for the answer to the problem you know so well.

Lynette Fromme

#29. Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self ... You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.

Nikki Gemmell

#30. Nothing on earth is so well-suited to make the sad merry, the merry sad, to give courage to the despairing, to make the proud humble, to lessen envy and hate, as music.

Martin Luther

#31. Scarlett (O'Hara) taught that one could be hungry and despairing, but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that precluded one from surrendering without a fight

Pat Conroy

#32. If you can't get your core audience to watch the show, it's very hard to then pull in enough people outside of your fan base to your network. The networks are just so branded now; USA can't really do a dark despairing drama and FX can't do a blue-sky show. People watch the networks they watch.

Warren Leight

#33. I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself.

Lord Byron

#34. As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

Chris Bohjalian

#35. A despairing arse will never produce a happy fart.

Frater U.D.

#36. Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Soren Kierkegaard

#37. What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

David Sedaris

#38. Progress is possible only when people believe in the possibilities of growth and change. Races or tribes die out not just when they are conquered and suppressed but when they accept their defeated condition, become despairing, and lose their excitement about the future. Norman Cousins Americans

Howard Bloom

#39. A despairing heart is the true prophet of approaching evil; his actions may weave the webs of Fortune, but not break them.

Francis Quarles

#40. God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless

Saint Augustine

#41. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

Edith Wharton

#42. The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.

Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up and doing that every day?

Ruth Ahmed