“There is a certain darkness into which the soul of the young man sometimes descends—a horror of desolation, abandonment, and realised worthlessness.”

Acknowledging the profound loneliness and despair that can accompany youth. · Speech, Values in Life, 1907

• Despair
• Loneliness
• Youth

“This morbidness seldom accompanies genuine poetic gifts.”

Rejecting fashionable despair as an automatic sign of poetic seriousness · Essay, On a Certain Affectation, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Criticism
• Despair
• Poetry

“What a terrible, lamentable thing growth is. It makes me mad to think that in a year or two at most the most perfect exquisite relation I have ever succeeded in making must naturally end.”

Lamenting how time and maturity inevitably alter cherished relationships · Letter to Victor Plarr, early 1890s

• Despair
• Love
• Time

“But no, my mother, I never ceased to love you, tho’ times have been, when that love was more remorse and agony, proclaiming aloud the duties which it gave no strength to perform.”

Confessing the painful distance between enduring love and neglected duty · Letter to Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 10 October 1831

• Despair
• Duty
• Love

“I have swallowed a famous draught of poison.”

Original: J’ai avalé une fameuse gorgée de poison. — The metaphor presents destructive experience as something deliberately endured and absorbed. · A Season in Hell, Night in Hell, 1873 (French)

• Despair
• Experience
• Suffering

“Rien n'est plus triste qu'un amour qui n'est pas partagé, sinon un amour qui l'est.”

Capturing the melancholy and vulnerability of emotional attachment · Aphorism, attributed to Paul-Jean Toulet

• Despair
• Love

“It seems to me an art to forget those things that make the heart heavy. If one can soar, he should soar, leaving his chains behind.”

Framing imaginative freedom as a way to rise above sorrow · Letter to Arna Bontemps, 1941

• Despair
• Freedom
• Hope

“Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.”

Finding comedy in deprivation without denying its reality · Essay on humour, collected essays

• Despair
• Joy

“Suffering is a real purification, and the worst thing I have always had to say against Christian Science is that it wilfully avoided suffering.”

Reflecting on suffering as an element in emotional and spiritual understanding · Letter to his mother, 21 December 1923

• Despair
• Faith
• Hope

“Don't feel badly when I die. I've been dead for a long time.”

A bleak late-life reflection on isolation and the feeling of having outlived one's own era · Conversation with a friend, later recollected

• Death
• Despair
• Time

“If only I could talk to you! If only I could make you understand!”

Distilling the anguish of failed communication · Short story, The Captain and the Miracle (1918)

• Despair
• Hope
• Truth

“It is a sad reflection—the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.”

Lamenting how life can squander what matters while preserving what does not · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Despair
• Mortality
• Time

“My book is out and I hate it, and so no doubt will you. Never mind, you will like me none the worse.”

Revealing anxiety and self-doubt at the moment of publication · Letter to Aubrey de Vere, 1847

• Despair
• Friendship
• Poetry

“Every master of pathos has a key of his own to unlock the source of tears, or of that passionate and piteous pleasure which lies above and under the region of tears.”

Suggesting that each great artist reaches emotion by a distinct path · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art
• Despair
• Joy

“This is a profound saying. Theism, Pantheism, Christianity, Positivism — they lie so close together that it is like splitting hairs to consider them apart. The vital issue is between optimism and pessimism.”

Showing the young Dowson framing belief chiefly through the opposition between hopeful and pessimistic views of existence · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Belief
• Despair
• Thought

“Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.”

Presenting hope as a source of sweetness even in barren circumstances · Prose writing

• Despair
• Hope

“We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.”

Condemning the gulf between proclaimed ideals and lived conduct · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Despair
• Truth

“To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.”

Presenting anger as a self-inflicted response to other people’s failings · Enchiridion, 1640 (aphorism)

• Despair
• Truth

“The bitterest and most enduring animosities would be likely to spring up from the ruins of old affection.”

Observing how damaged love can harden into lasting resentment · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Despair
• Love
• Truth

“I am profoundly in the D's – discouraged, depressed, disheartened, disgusted.”

A frank expression of deep emotional weariness · Diary (commonly attributed)

• Despair
• Emotion
• Sadness

“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

Presenting suffering as a difficult education of the self · Letter to George Keats, 14 February–3 May 1819

• Despair
• Mortality
• Truth

“It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.”

Contrasting material expansion with spiritual emptiness · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Despair
• Faith

“Man is never so unhappy as he seems, nor so happy as he imagines.”

A widely attributed translation from the Zibaldone, though wording varies considerably between editions · Zibaldone, as commonly translated

• Despair
• Joy
• Truth

“Moral of the whole affair: our optimistic wishes and hopes are still decidedly premature, if we are ever to see them fulfilled at all. I am thoroughly weary of Germany.”

Original: Moral des Ganzen: unsere optimistischen Wünsche u. Hoffnungen sind noch reichlich verfrüht, wenn wir überhaupt jemals ihre Erfüllung erleben sollten. Ich bin reichlich deutschlandmüde. — A candid expression of disillusionment shortly before the outbreak of the First World War · Letter to René Schickele, July 1914 (German)

• Despair
• Hope
• Politics