Do not give up in despair because you have a small income, and resign yourself to living meanly, in a hand to mouth fashion. Self-denial and saving and resolute abstention from luxuries will solve the problem. (1890)

- Mary Hinman Abel

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.

- Hafiz of Persia

Do not despair, every new born baby is a potential prophet.

- R. D. Laing

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

- Hafiz of Persia

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

- Agatha Christie

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; and where there is sadness, joy

- Francis of Assisi

Action is the antidote to despair.

- Joan Baez

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

- Marion Zimmer Bradley

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

- Elie Wiesel

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

- Albert Camus

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, always.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

- Elie Wiesel

In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family's story embodies its hope and despair.

- Auguste Napier

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is na?ve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

- H. L. Mencken

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Caesar and Cleopatra

- George Bernard Shaw



A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. [New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963]

- Abraham Joshua Heschel



When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. 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 curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

- Henri Nouwen