We’ve collected the best Despair Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Robert Stack, Sharon Salzberg, Mary Harris Jones, Elmer Davis, Rick Wilson. Use them as an inspiration.
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I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.
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You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fears; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
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I despair of reality television, but I’ve never met anyone who watches it. Or people say, ‘I watch it, but I hate it.’ I’ve never met anyone who loves it. It’s like, it’s there, and we have to accept it.
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Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages – and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.
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When I started doing music, it was out of despair and boredom. I got passionate about it, and I felt that it allowed me to become somebody: an artist who explores her different identities.
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When I’m not creating something, I get bored; I despair.
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Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.
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My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
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Being alone with fear can rapidly turn into panic. Being alone with frustration can rapidly turn into anger. Being alone with disappointment can rapid turn into discouragement and, even worse, despair.
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God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.
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I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking.
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If you’re an advocate of gentleness, you’re simplistic and naive. If you’re an advocate of despair and hate, you’re sophisticated.
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But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.
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You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it’s the worst decision in your life. That’s fine. That’s not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It’s a sign that it’s normal; it’s on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue.
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Despair has its own calms.
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It is my firm belief that I have a link with the past and a responsibility to the future. I cannot give up. I cannot despair. There’s a whole future, generations to come. I have to keep trying.
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Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve convinced myself – I hope I’m right – that children despair of you if you don’t tell them the truth.
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As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.
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Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don’t read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
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Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.
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Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
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As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn’t find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.
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The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do ‘Things Have Changed,’ or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo’s ‘The David‘ or that movie ‘Lost in Translation‘ – it inspires me to try and find my own version of that.
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At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
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Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we’ve reached a point where we’ve discovered most of the things. I’m going tell you right now: Please don’t despair.
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I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times, I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success; at others, I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.
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Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties.
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To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.
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Incumbent White House parties have won 10 of the last 18 presidential elections; the odds are tight, but they favor Obama in 2012. And so gloomy Democrats, check your despair; gleeful Republicans, watch the hubris.
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Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.
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A novel is something, while despair is nothing.
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Life begins on the other side of despair.
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What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.
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If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch – the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday – you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It’s always small, but it’s real.
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I don’t want to live in a culture of despair. I’d like to live in a culture of hope.
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Unprecedented financial pressures, and an ever-increasingly aggressive public culture, along with social, moral and spiritual fragmentation, are leading to lives being overwhelmed by stress, intolerable interior isolation and even quiet despair.
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Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not be an endless preoccupation. You must dwell also on the glad remembrance of God’s loving-kindness; otherwise, sadness will harden the heart and lead it more deeply into despair.
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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.
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There’s a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
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We have to look at levels of migration. We are in a world that is quite chaotic. Some people are really frightened about it. Some people are quite despairing. They don’t believe our country is capable of providing a good quality of life. That feeds into why people voted Ukip and induces a culture of despair.
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My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
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Despair gives courage to a coward.
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Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It’s a journey of discovery – there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.
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Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.
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Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.
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I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.
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You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.
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When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it, focusing instead on the short-term.
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When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.
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I am pretty much as you see me. I don’t have deep, dark depths and go home in despair.
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Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
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I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this – or else face utter despair.
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The responses that environmentalists evoke – fear, anxiety, numbness, despair – are not helpful, even if they are understandable. It should be fascinating, even enthralling, to be in the milieu of environmental change.
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Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
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Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!
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Action is the antidote to despair.
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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.
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I came of age during AIDS and the terror of that and the sadness and the death and the overwhelming despair.
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To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.
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Despair is the conclusion of fools.
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We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.
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There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.
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I wouldn’t make the film that was an hour and half progression from sadness to despair. I’m hugely optimistic.
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The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I’m trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.
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Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.
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Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation.
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Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.
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As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.
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If falling into desperation worked to make things better, then I would say, ‘Let’s all jump into despair.’ But it doesn’t help. The only way to truly find meaning and fulfillment is to look at the disaster, the pain, the difficulty, and know with complete certainty that good can come from this.
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You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.
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‘Grbavica’ is first of all a story about love, about love that is not pure because it has been mixed with hate, disgust, trauma, despair.
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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They’re going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that’s true for everybody – I don’t care what color you are.
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White-on-black shootings evoke America’s history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair.
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Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair.
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In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory – there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
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Despair is a cop-out, the ultimate abdication of all responsibility, in which people feel justified in their feelings of impotence. But if, on the other hand, you feel that your work in the world does make a difference and that you do have the power to change things, the nay-sayers will turn a deaf ear.
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Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
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Clearly, we must denounce militaristic approaches to global unrest and find life-affirming ways to end repressive cycles of violence rooted in discrimination, humiliation, and despair.
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I am prone to despair. We are all born with a particular personality. I get afraid and then I don’t want to leave the house.
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Music is entertainment, and we need that in order not to fall into the pit of despair.
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There is no love of life without despair of life.
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But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
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A lot of times, people think that it doesn’t make sense for people to be depressed when they have everything, a loving husband, a successful career, fame and fortune. I wanted to make this point that profound despair can strike anybody.
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There’s always hope, and there’s always despair.
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It is not enough to tackle the mechanics of terror organizations. We must also tackle the situations that create terrorists. We desperately need to address the frustration, the loss and the despair that drive some to these actions.
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A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.
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Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
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As a nation, we face a choice. With parts of the world on fire, can we ignore the despair beyond our borders? Or do we use our global influence and leadership to confront these challenges head-on?
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I wanted to produce a book that would demonstrate not only the rich diversity of people who answered to Anders’s command but also the extraordinary variety of their experiences and emotions: from death to despair, fear and longings and eventually to hope.
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Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt… doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.
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