Pain and Despair

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

When the lamp is shattered

Most wretched men

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

‘Do you know what a pessimist is?’ ‘A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.’

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

’Tis very like: he hath the falling sickness.

Human life begins on the far side of despair.

Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms.

The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.

When I consider how my light is spent,

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail.

The sun to me is dark

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him

Me miserable! which way shall I fly

Evil, be thou my good.

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.