Quotes About Not Despairing

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

Frater U.D.

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

Soren Kierkegaard

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

David Sedaris

#15. 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

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

Alfred De Musset

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

Francis Quarles

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

William Shakespeare

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Charlotte Bronte

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

Nancy Springer

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Alex Steffen

#41. On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.

Nellie Bly

#42. For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to mood, in her literary pursuits. Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now despairing because some contrary character would NOT behave properly.

L.M. Montgomery

#43. 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

#44. Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.

Sol Luckman

#45. Is there no hope? the sick man said, The silent doctor shook his head, And took his leave with signs of sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow.

John Gay

#46. 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

#47. When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; ... despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, ... I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended.

Elmina Drake Slenker

#48. He believed that faith gives health. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing by pointing out the Man of Resignation, and to transform the grief that contemplates the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.

Victor Hugo

#49. If we cannot claim to live sinless lives, then the only thing that can keep us from despairing before a holy God is that we have an Advocate in heaven and He pleads our case not on the basis of our perfection but of His propitiation.

John Piper

#50. I hardly have any names on my dance card," Emma said, slightly despairing. This was not how she imagined her debut.
"There are just four names on mine," Olivia said. "But I think the gentlemen only agreed to escape my mother. I really can't blame them.

Maya Rodale

#51. It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

Magnus Magnusson

#52. All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

Martin McDonagh

#53. 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

#54. The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.

Paul Russell

#55. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.

Anais Nin

#56. The least sin should humble the soul, but certainly the greatest sin should never discourage the soul, much less should it work the soul to despair. Despairing Judas perished, whereas the murderers of Christ, believing on Him, were saved.

Thomas Brooks

#57. Why is it that my heart is so touched whenever I meet a dog lost in our noisy streets? Why do I feel such anguished pity when I see one of these creatures coming and going, sniffing everyone, frightened, despairing of even finding its master?

Emile Zola

#58. Our whole life consists of despairing of an answer and seeking an answer.

Dorothee Solle

#59. Whenever her focus slipped, it slipped onto James Holden. The sound of his voice, his despairing and undaunted laughter, the shape of his ass. He haunted her.

James S.A. Corey

#60. The note of almost unbearable irritation sounding through the deliberately calm tone in which he has just spoken penetrates her child's heart like a cruel needle of ice. Her face falls grotesquely, her mouth trembles, tears - the sudden, despairing tears of a hurt child - fill her eyes to the brim.

Anna Kavan

#61. 'T is sweeter for thee despairing Than aught in the world beside,-Jessy!

Robert Burns

#62. (1.) To repent without despairing; (2.) To believe without being presumptuous; (3.) To rejoice without falling into levity; (4.) To be angry without sinning.

J.C. Ryle

#63. In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful.

Don McLean

#64. January is the despairing heart of the Scottish winter

Denise Mina

#65. Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ...

Theodor Adorno

#66. Flowers grow beneath her feet, but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams.

Rani Manicka

#67. Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men ...
(The Everlasting No)

Thomas Carlyle

#68. The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man writhed.
He felt that he had been stopped short.

Victor Hugo

#69. Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

Ellen Glasgow

#70. The canary is like a man's soul. It sees bars around it, but instead of despairing, it sings.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#71. You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.

Elie Wiesel

#72. 8we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; 9persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 10always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

Anonymous

#73. Gospel hope keeps us from being muted by being either a naive Pollyanna or a despairing Cassandra. Voices of warning are meant to be heard, not just raised.

Neal A. Maxwell

#74. I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. [ ... ] And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again - unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality.

James Baldwin

#75. I felt deep within me that 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! - The Narrator.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#76. Beware of despairing about yourself: you are commanded to put your trust in God, and not in yourself.

Saint Augustine

#77. I've always had a passion for tearing the bandages from other people's eyes. I've always insisted that those round me should see things as they are. I suppose it is that I need companionship in despair. I can't understand not despairing.

Francois Mauriac

#78. I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.

Carrie Brownstein