I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking.

If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

When too many Americans don't vote or participate, some see apathy and despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out of this frustration can come hope and action.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.