"Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented men and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound."

Despair, Sorrow, Depth, Purpose, Life

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"Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented men and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound."

Exlpore more Despair quotes

"I knew I was catching at straws; but in the wide and weltering deep where I found myself, I would have caught at cobwebs."

Charlotte Bronte, British Novelist

Despair, Desperation, Hope, Survival, Faith

"I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself."

Laurie Halse Anderson, American Author

Despair, Self, Isolation, Pain

"We destroy ourselves when we are ignorant or decide to live in ignorance."

Sunday Adelaja, Nigerian Author

Despair, Ignorance, Destruction, Awareness, Consequences

"It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world."

John Fowles, English Novelist

Despair, Violence, Humanity, Ethics

"Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss."

Alexandre Dumas, French Dramatist

Despair, Feeling, Man

"Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die."

John Green, American Author

Despair, Self, Hate, Emotion, Truth

"So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all."

Charles Bukowski, American Author

Despair, Addiction, Waiting, Isolation

"When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make."

James Weldon Johnson, American Poet

Despair, London, Man, Paris

"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."

Rebecca Solnit, American Actress

Despair, Certainty, Future, Emotion

"I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything."

Robin Hobb, American Author

Despair, Sensitivity, Regret, Self-Worth, Sadness

Explore more quotes by Hermann Hesse

"And those of us who trust ourselves the least,Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,Will make their mark upon eternity,And youth will turn to them as to a feast.The time may come when a man who confessedHis self-doubts will be ranked among the blessedWho never suffered anguish or knew fear,Whose times were times of glory and good cheer,Who lived like children, simple happy lives.For in us too is part of that Eternal MindWhich through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind:Both you and I will pass, but it survives."

Impact

"We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps."

Evolution

"Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them."

Tragedy

"And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over."

Mortality

"I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue and accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and have just been born today."

Awareness

"If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I'd be glad, but all the same I'd look at it with a colder eye. I'd say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn't have to be today."

Beauty

"In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified."

Creation

"When someone is seeking, said Siddartha, "It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose."

Discovery

"And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than the man."

Identity

"But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual, the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross."

Existence