··· Tags pointing to: despair ···

Searching subset of Hope?

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer  <link>

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in Hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

— Dorothy Sayers  <link>

For Whatever Reason

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

— Dorothy L. Sayers  <link>

Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.

— Meister Eckhart  <link>

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin  <link>

When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.

— Henri Nouwen  <link>