Quotes about Despair

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. That was all I wanted, he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

Beautiful lives women live—women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts—of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair—move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or any ability to hurt.

Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.

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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.

opening lines of Ecclesiastes: "'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher. 'Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.

Insufficient respect for mystery leads to intellectual suicide; insufficient penetration of mystery leads to shallowness and despair.

When you produce a thought of hatred, anger, or despair, it harms you, and it also harms the world. None of us wants to be continued like that. We all want to produce thoughts of compassion, understanding, and love.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly.

For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You.

To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.