Best Despair Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“A tired man lay down his head”

“Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.”

“Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.”

“Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.”

“For Death is the meaning of night;”

“Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.”

“No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.”

“There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.”

“I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.”

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”

“It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just”

“Unlike pain, happiness, no matter how big it is, doesn’t last long.”

“Safe Despair it is that raves—”

“Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,”

“I might just end up writing again”

“Dolor”

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,”

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”

“I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls.”

“With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.”

“In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.”

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”

“This is the way the world ends”

“In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,”

“Knowing the Techniques of Survival........”

“And now, for something completely the same:”

“Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce contribute towards the greater equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth.”

“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”

“[...]it is necessary for a man to know and believe every moment that there is somewhere a perfect and peaceful happiness, for everyone and for everything … The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite is as necessary for man as the small planet he inhabits.”