#despair

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#despair #ignorance #insight #loneliness #love

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#help #love

...you can take comfort that despair is the worst thing he can spring on you. Things can appear to grow worse, but if you conquer despair, no deeper pit remains to trap you. ↗

— Bodie Thoene

#men

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair. ↗

— Matthew Arnold

#despair #dream #must #need #thou

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

#causes #cleanse #despair #eliminate #failed

Action is the antidote to despair. ↗

— Joan Baez

#antidote #despair

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. ↗

— Aeschylus

#awful #cannot #comes #despair #drop

People are really suffering these days. There's a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for. ↗

— Laurie Anderson

#days #despair #lot #people #personal

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#beginning #beings #chaotic #contrary #depressing

Life begins on the other side of despair. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#despair #life #other #side