When the tide of life turns against you And the current upsets your boat, Dont waste tears on what might have been, Just lie on your back and float. – Anon.
The person who lives by hope will die by despair. – Italian Proverb
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
Fatalism is the lazy mans way of accepting the inevitable. – Natalie Clifford Barney
Make sense who may. I switch off. – Samuel Beckett
Then my verse I dishonor, my pictures despise, my person degrade and my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; and my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. – William Blake
To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred. – Albert Camus
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope. – Thomas Carlyle
Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: Its four o clock. At five I have my abyss… – Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham. – Joseph Conrad
Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius. – Benjamin Disraeli
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. – Andre Dubus
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering – F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall — think of it, ALWAYS. – Mahatma Gandhi
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas. – Gunther Grass
