Quotes about Despair

Beware of despair.  You do not serve a tyrant, but your service is to a kind Lord, Who, taking nothing from you, He has given you all.  And when you did not exist at all, He fashioned you so that you would be in that [ state ] in which you now are.  Who is sufficient to render Him thanks for the fact that He has brought us into existence?  O the immeasurable grace!  Who can sufficiently honor Him with hymns?  For He has given us knowledge of all things.  And not only those which are manifest, but also of the hidden things.  For we know that if there is anything we do not know, it is necessary for us only to ask this [ knowledge ] from Him.

Obsessing on evil is boring.  Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick.  Wallowing is despair is a bad habit.  Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.  and then another: my daughter in a yellow dress.  And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon.  Until I learned to be in love with my life again.  Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, i have taught myself joy, over and over again. 

You moan, "She left me."  "He left me,"
Twenty more will come.

"Two men were in prison. One looked down to the mud in despair, the other looked up to the stars in hope."

Despair is the only cure for illusion.

Everything that humans want or desire or hope for, every kind of external fetish no matter how remote or minor that they may premise some key part of their happiness upon, is a nerve that can be tweaked, a fear that can be toyed with -- even by oneself. Most of the "present" in human life is really subjective projections of a kind of future that one needs to believe in, in order to stave off despair or futility or disillusionment, etc. We live most of our lives in an unwitting subjunctive mood, in the unrecognized modulation from actualities into the possibilities of an always-intoxicating wish-world.

Red lips, White lies.... I smile for you.

I looked at the ceiling and wished this life was over.  This unhappy life that had started out so confidently.  I thought I would sleep no more that night but eventually I did.  In the end we always wear out our worries.That's what Wireman says.  (as the character Edgar from 'Duma Key')

"You need hedges.""Hedges," I said, bemused.  "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept.  "Hedges against the night."(in conversation btwn Edgar and his Dr.)

Eventually, as we become more fully aware of our problems, another critical point is reached, when insights really have occurred and we try to act upon them. We then discover to our dismay that our attempts to solve them by an effort of will avails us nothing, that our good intentions, as the saying goes, merely pave the way to hell. Good intentions all too readily can foster the illusion that we have settled an issue, when actually it is far from settled and seems to have not the slightest intention of ever being settled. This leads to a deadlock in which we see we need to change but cannot, try as we may. We know we need to renounce our egoistic controlling attempts but we cannot even make ourselves do that. We are up against the paradox that discipline and conscious effort are indispensable but do not get us far enough in our really critical areas. We reach the point where we are tempted to give up in despair because after all, what's the use? We begin to feel that analysis is like deliberate, organized torture; the most problematic things are rubbed in again and again and no matter how we exert ourselves there is no way to change them.

This state has its meaning too. As Dante puts it, the entrance to purgatory is at the deepest point of hell. A resolution of this seemingly hopeless impasse eventually occurs by virtue of the awareness that the ego's claim of a capacity to control rests on an illusion. Without the actual experience of this sort of impasse the ego cannot renounce its claim to the central position. It is only when we have come to our wits' end, and this in the face of our most sincere and extreme efforts, only when we realize that we are hopelessly incapable of changing ourselves, can we begin to accept our real existential position in the life drama. When we are able to say. "this is I, this is my being, and nothing can save me from or free me from being this sort of person," then we have come to the point of acceptance that initiates a fundamental transformation of which we are the object, not the subject. Transformation of our personality occurs in us, upon us but not by us. The unconscious changes itself and us in response to our awareness and acceptance of our station, of our cross.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

Love is not always power; that
may be as good a description of the
human predicament as we are
likely to get.

Happiness, enthusiasm, joy and love are just as contagious as sadness, apathy, despair and fear. Which will you spread?

We were told we could do anything we wanted and then when we tried they told us we couldn't. That's Generation X, the generation trapped between idealism and despair.

d.b.mon. april 26, 1742
Oh that i could spend every moment of my life to His Glory!!

tues. april 27 1742
if i had a thousand lives my soul would gladly have laid them all down at once to have been with Christ.

i never felt so great a degree of resignation in my life.

oh that my soul might never offer any dead, cold services to my God!

friday april 30 1742

Nothing greives me so much as that i cannot live constantly to God's glory.

David Brainerd-saturday april 10 1742

oh, that al my late distresses and awful apprehensions might prove but Christ's school to make me fit for greater service, by teaching me the great lesson of Humility!

David Brainerd-Sunday, april 4 1742

O my Blessed  God! let me climb up near to Him, and love, and long, and plead, and wrestle, and strech after Him, and for deliverence from the body of sin and death. Alas! my soul mourned to think i should ever lose sight of its Beloved again. O come, Lord Jesus, amen.

"But in the mud and scum of things
There always, always something sings."

Anyone desperate enough for suicide... should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.

The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity.  We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.

We met… and from then on, it became impossible ever again to give up completely.  I have given some thought to why this should be.
I believe it was love.  When once you have encountered it, you will never sink again.  Then you will always yearn for the light and the surface.

We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever known, if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadow passes over your hands and over all that you do.  You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

I can endure my own despair but not another's hope.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.