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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Despondency

Sorrow comes soon enough without despondency, It does a man no good to carry around a lightning-rod to attract trouble.

Aughey.

Open your heart to sympathy, but close it against despondency. The flower which opens to receive the dew shuts against the rain.

Aughey.

  • All day the darkness and the cold
  • Upon my heart have lain,
  • Like shadows on the winter sky,
  • Like frost upon the pane.
  • Whittier.

  • The recollection of one upward hour
  • Hath more in it to tranquilize and cheer
  • The darkness of despondency, than years
  • Of gayety and pleasure.
  • Percival.

  • No thought within her bosom stirs,
  • But wakes some feeling dark and dread;
  • God keep thee from a doom like hers,
  • Of living when the hopes are dead.
  • Phœbe Cary.

    Some persons depress their own minds, despond at the first difficulty; and conclude that making any progress in knowledge, farther than serves their ordinary business, is above their capacities.

    Locke.

  • My heart is very tired—my strength is low—
  • My hands are full of blossoms pluck’d before
  • Held dead within them till myself shall die.
  • Mrs. Browning.

    To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.

    Jeremy Collier.

    Despondency is not a state of humility; on the contrary, it is the vexation and despair of a cowardly pride—nothing is worse; whether we stumble or whether we fall, we must only think of rising again and going on in our course.

    Fénelon.

    Life is a warfare; and he who easily desponds deserts a double duty—he betrays the noblest property of man, which is dauntless resolution; and he rejects the providence of that All-Gracious Being who guides and rules the universe.

    Jane Porter.