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