Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
Eugene Ionesco

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky

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

Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies.
John Shelby Spong

Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through.
Susannah McCorkle

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.
Paul Westerberg

The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair.
Mercy Otis Warren

The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
Herbert Read

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.
Angelina Grimke

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.
Henri Nouwen

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Jose Bergamin

The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.
Michael Cunningham

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
Max Jacob

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy

The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.
Charles W. Chesnutt

Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.
Andre Malraux

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
George Eliot

There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.
Miguel de Cervantes

There was a castle called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair.
John Bunyan