There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed to have despaired and have recovered hope.

If your determination is fixed I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength but perseverance.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time at all times who suffers harm done to others whose greatest passion is compassion whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair against our will comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

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.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life and the promise of future accomplishments.

What other people call dark and despairing I call funny.