Best 1597 quotes in «despair quotes» category

To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.

To whomever is writing this book, what do you want from me? I need to know my calling. Why was I chosen? Why not Lee? Why not Susan March? Why me? What is my purpose? Please let it be more than to destroy a life and embarrass another. I need to know. I am suffering. You are a constant headache. Anywhere I go, I can hear you, I can feel you. I want to be like the others, ignorant of this.

Tragedy is a disaster; but desperation after that tragedy is a much greater disaster!

Trees lose their leaves in blizzards like these.

Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.

Trust in the Lord brings much hope, joy and peace.

Trust is an illusion meant to wrap one in a false sense of belief, in that moment of realization will despair ultimately set in.

Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn’t want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus’s words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard.

Uncle said, "If love would save him, wouldn't no harm come to him.

Un désespoir calme, froid, sinistre.

Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return.

(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes - the presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable - the unloving and the unloved - there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death - the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. ("The Lifted Veil")

We all face difficult times. It is only the grace of God that gives strength to endure.

Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward? How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?

We all get in a funk sometimes. It doesn't mean you're failing, or ungrateful, or stupid, or lost. It means you're human. The Funk happens. For all of us. We can’t be happy all the time. We don’t need to be.

We are sometimes dragged into a pit of unhappiness by someone else’s opinion that we do not look happy.

We are in despair because we don’t know the Lord.

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 2 Corinthians 4:8-9

We endure every adversity by grace.

We carry on not by letting go of the worries that burden us; but by staying true to our hearts & the meaning that surrounds us.

We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep"; beseeching Him of His mercy, that as in the beginning He discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so He would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.

We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep".

We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth. God help us, for we knew the worst too young! from "Gentleman Rankers

We have the keys to open the Heavens door; Bible reading and prayer.

We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.

We held on to great memories. This sustains us in every moment.

We know Job's faith survived because his reaction to his devastating loss was to worship God: "Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head, and he fell to the ground and worshiped. He said, 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord'" (Job 1:20-21). Let me encourage you and your messed up man, should he be willing, to begin to worship God from your place of brokenness. Tina shares a dramatic story from her work as a music therapist for hospice. One day, as she prepared to leave the hospice floor at the hospital, a nurse called her back to work with a patient in respiratory arrest. Music therapists use music to match the beat of a patient's heart rate, and as the therapist slows down the beat of music, most of the time the heart rate follows, as well as the breathing. At the start of the process, the patient's wife shouted, "Sing 'Amazing Grace'?" Deciding to minister rather than work, Tina sang "Amazing Grace." The patient's distress was overwhelming. He could hardly take in air, and his chest heaved while his wife wept. Right in the middle of "Amazing Grace," The wife once more blurted out, "Sing 'Jesus Loves Me'!" Tina, switched gears and sang, "Yes, Jesus loves me." Tears streamed down the man's cheeks as he sang with her, "Yes, Jesus loves me." His words were broken and he could hardly say them, but in that moment, he worshiped the God who was about to take him home. Whatever you're facing . . . worship.

We learn nothing from despair and that's what makes it despair.

Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.

We must endure the present circumstances for a far greater future.

We must graciously endure the times.

We make people special to us, believing that they can save us. When one thing doesn’t work, we look somewhere else to be saved. We rarely question the concept, itself. Sometimes, we don’t look to another person to save us but to money, acknowledgement, a title, a cause, a notion of ourselves. None of it can save us. We travel the path in different ways; some are polite, some are ruthless, some are clever, some are instinctive. In the end, it all leads to the same despairing place. In the unsuspecting quiet moments, there it is; a sense of peace and a feeling that everything is fine without searching for anything to be saved by.

We must patiently endure the times.

We must read, mediate and affirm the writings of Holy Scriptures, to partake in the divine nature and overcome the struggles of life.

We only need grace to get up, whenever we fall.

We need to develop new strategies overcome every challenge.

We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.

We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth... you will always be in despair.

What a betrayal of life, of sense, to choose hate over love, despair over happiness.

We will share each other’s burdens with love and kindness.

What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain?

What can I tell you about the alchemy of twins? Twins are two bodies that dance to each other’s joy. Two minds that drown in each other’s despair. Two spirits that fly with each other’s love. Twins are two separate beings conjoined at the heart!

...what dystopian forces in the universe had conspired to get the two of them, with their destroyed souls, together, in this dance of despair.

Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God wil open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that has been denied.

What is particularly striking about his reconstruction and criticisms of the traditional account of friendship is that he finds it deficient not only by the light of his own Christian viewpoint; he also finds friendship deficient when judged from the perspective of its own self-proclaimed ethical foundations. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes that the reciprocity involved in friendship actually betrays its essential selfishness.

What is new is that we now know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we're left with a desperate sense that all of it is exploding, all the time.

What kind of person dreams about life alone if not a broken one? What kind of person dreams about a nonsensical life hidden in the shadows of despair?

What is unbelief but the despair, dictated by the dominant powers, that nothing can really change?

What makes the hero truly great is never, never to despair.

... What of this "despair?" I know it all too well... because up until now... I've climbed up, kicked it in it's teeth, and surpassed it... over and over again just to make it to this very moment!