despair

PATIENCE, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

Despair the twin-born of devotion.

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

There are some words that I have never really understood, such as sin. . . . For if there is sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another life and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.

To those who despair of everything, reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.

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.

I don't know where hell is . . . another dimension, perhaps, or another plane of reality. As for getting there . . . it's a choice between sinning and being tricked by demons! It's a plane of evil . . . despair . . . and magic of the foulest kind

Presume not in prosperity, neither despair in adversity: court not dangers, nor meanly fly from before them: dare to despise whatever will not remain with thee.

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

In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. Quoted by Robert F. Kennedy, delivering an extemporaneous eulogy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the evening of April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana. These words, lacking "own," have been used as one of the inscriptions at the Robert F. Kennedy gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery.