* 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.
o George Eliot, in Adam Bede (1859)

* If either the absence or the presence of novelty is equally annoying, it would hardly seem that either could be the true cause of despair.
o Bertrand Russell, in Conquest of Happiness (1930), Ch. 2: Byronic Unhappiness

* Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
o Percy Bysshe Shelley, in "Fragments of Adonais" in Relics of Shelley (1862) edited by Richard Garnett

* Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.
o R. S. Thomas, in "Tidal" in Mass for Hard Times (1992), p. 43

* Mr. Fearing had, I think, a slough of despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as he was.
o John Bunyan, p. 191.

 

* Despair is Freedom.
o Anonymous

* Don't you understand? Can't you see? You're all going to die!
o Otto Witt, trying to convince the garrison at Rourke's Drift to flee (Film Zulu)

* Senator, I agree with you-and I would also say that despair is not a method.
o General John Abizaid, in response to Hillary Clinton's 'Hope is not a strategy'.
 

* What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
o George Eliot

* The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.
o Søren Kierkegaard