This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is that of death! Without this radiant idea - this delightful morning star, indicting that the luminary of eternity is going to rise, life would, to my view, darken into midnight melancholy. The expectation of living here, and living thus always, would be indeed a prospect of overwhelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms us to die; thanks to that gospel which opens the vision of an endless life; and thanks above all to that Saviour friend who has promised to conduct the faithful through the sacred trance of death, into scenes of Paradise and everlasting delight." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"Those evils I deserve, yet despair not of His final pardon whose ear is ever open and his eye gracious to readmit the supplicant." - John Milton
"It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is despair." - Joseph Campbell
"Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the good ness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life." - Kahlil Gibran
"Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution." - Kahlil Gibran
"Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments: even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression." - Lewis Mumford
"No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination. In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair." - Loren Eiseley
"He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor." - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
"There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were a man ever so benighted, or forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in him who actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The entire world shall be populous with that action which saves one soul from despair." - Omar Khayyám
"To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us." - Philip Massinger
"The final test of religious faith... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair." - Samuel Ullman
"Be cheerful: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized until a chain is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy" - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace where there is hatred... let me sow love. Where there is injury... pardon. Where there is doubt... faith. Where there is despair... hope. Where there is darkness... light. Where there is sadness... joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled... as to console, to be understood... as to understand; to be loved... as to love, for it is in giving... that we receive. It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned, it is in dying... that we are born to eternal life." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
"There is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair." - Thomas Carlyle
"In idleness there is perpetual despair." - Thomas Carlyle
"Crisis is creative... Out of crises flow new ideas, new approaches, new patterns, new inventions, new discoveries, new leadership... Crisis is challenge. It can challenge you to create a new life. Out of disappointment and defeat, out of illness and despair you can find victory." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Despair swallows up cowardice." - William Hazlitt
"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." - Woody Allen, formally Heywood "Woody" Allen, born Allan Stewart Konigsberg
"The person who feels despair and discouragement is asking the wrong question. He asks what the world is giving him. As soon as he changes his question to what is the good that he can do, he will always be able to find an answer." - Zelig Pliskin
"Despair over loneliness will increase the suffering. Looking at the time available as a precious gift will decrease it." - Zelig Pliskin
"Kind sleep affords the only boon the wretched mind can feel; a momentary respite from despair." - Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, also known as Mulock, Mrs Craik, Mrs Craik, Miss Mulok, Miss Muloch, Miss Mulock
"Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie, concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible." - Francis Bacon
"When you feel an emotion such as despair or in a depression, that is a low frequency current of energy. It has very little energy. And someone who is in despair or in a depression soaks up energy." - Gary Zukav
"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 to have recovered hope." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life." - Gretel Ehrlich
"People who are in despair always make a mistake when they hang themselves; the next day often brings the unknown. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn't come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety." - Irvin David Yalom
"To be lonely, that is to feel oneself isolated, having no relationship with anything; in that sense of loneliness there is despair - there are moods, one is familiar with that sense of loneliness - and one runs away from it by turning on the radio, by reading a book, by sex and ten different activities. That loneliness is the very essence of self-consciousness. And when one goes beyond that, there is this state of attention in which there is complete aloneness, which is not isolation, which is not separation, which is not a withdrawal. Because it is only this aloneness, when the mind is no longer a plaything of thought, when thought has been understood totally - then out of that comes this sense of aloneness. it is that which is innocence, and it is that innocence which is beyond all mortality." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness." - James Henry Leigh Hunt
"The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to despair is a limitless trust and hope. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity. To work for peace is to work for a true political solution; it is to work for the Kingdom of God. It is to work to enable every one to live and taste the secret joys of the human person united to the eternal." - Jean Vanier
"Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies." - Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
"It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money." - John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
"Sophisticated thinking may enable man to feign his being sufficient to himself. Yet the way to insanity is paved with such illusions. The feeling of futility that comes with the sense of being useless, of not being needed in the world, is the most common cause of psychoneurosis. The only way to avoid despair is to be a need rather than an end. Happiness, in fact, may be defined as the certainty of being needed. But who is in need of man?" - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Whoever feels pain in hearing a good character of his neighbor will feel a pleasure in the reverse; and those who despair to rise in distinction by their virtues are happy if others can be depressed to a level with themselves." - John Marshall Barker
"Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
"Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,or drown in despair when his days darken." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
"Law is born from despair of human nature. " - José Ortega y Gasset
"Don't despair of a student if he has one clear idea." - Nathanael Emmons, also Nathaniel Emmons
"Persons are thinking and reflective as well as merely existing beings. They have unanswered puzzles in their minds as well as unrelieved estrangement in their souls. They have skeptical doubts about the truth they possess as well as despair about the meaning of life that is theirs. They are curious about intellectual answers as well as hungry for a new mode of being or existing. And clearly these two levels, the existential and the intellectual-reflective, are interacting and interrelated all the time." - Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
"The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give. They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them and they make us despair in losing them." - Madame de Lambert, fully Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert
"Fools usually know best that which the wise despair of ever comprehending." - Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach, or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachová, Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
"If we are to find our way across troubled waters, we are better served by the company of those who have built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia." - Marilyn Ferguson