"despair"タグの名言

I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. - Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.

For Death is the meaning of night; The eternal shadow Into which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.

Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.

Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.

Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.

Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels. Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.

Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.

It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.

In the midst of happiness or despair in sorrow or in joy in pleasure or in pain: Do what is right and you will be at peace.

The Wind Will Carry Us In my night, so brief, alas The wind is about to meet the leaves. My night so brief is filled with devastating anguish Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows? This happiness feels foreign to me. I am accustomed to despair. Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows? There, in the night, something is happening The moon is red and anxious. And, clinging to this roof That could collapse at any moment, The clouds, like a crowd of mourning women, Await the birth of the rain. One second, and then nothing. Behind this window, The night trembles And the earth stops spinning. Behind this window, a stranger Worries about me and you. You in your greenery, Lay your hands – those burning memories – On my loving hands. And entrust your lips, replete with life's warmth, To the touch of my loving lips The wind will carry us! The wind will carry us!

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

It's nonsensical the way you tickle my ventricles and use many magical mirrors to show me I'm identical to everything that's invincible.

We as servants of the Lord are advocates of joy. We know that “men are that they might have joy.” In contrast, the way of the adversary always leads to misery, despair, and destruction.

It’s a privilege to feel. And misery, my friend, is necessary. Otherwise, happiness would lose its charm.

Sad faces are reflected in clouds of despair, but happy faces are what bathes our emotions in happiness.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it’s an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. (Letters on Life)

I have always believed there is a comfort to be found in despair: namely, from the knowledge that, like a pendulum at its extreme, one is simply gathering momentum for the reversal, the plunge back toward a mood of possiblity. If happiness can be tempered by the knowledge that it won't last, then surely the opposite is also true.