In moments when life feels overwhelming and the light at the end of the tunnel seems to fade, finding solace in words can offer the strength to persevere. Hopelessness can touch anyone, but it's important to remember that you're not alone in this struggle. Drawing wisdom from those who have walked similar paths can ignite the spark of hope within us. This carefully curated collection of 67 quotes on overcoming hopelessness is designed to inspire, uplift, and remind you of the resilience that lies within. Let these words guide you towards a place of renewed hope and possibility, transforming despair into a stepping stone on your journey forward.
1. “There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.” - Charles Dickens
2. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door — Only this, and nothing more."Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrowFrom my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore —For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore — Nameless here for evermore.And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtainThrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door —Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; — This it is, and nothing more."Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,That I scarce was sure I heard you"— here I opened wide the door; — Darkness there, and nothing more.Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" — Merely this, and nothing more.Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore —Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; — 'Tis the wind and nothing more."Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door —Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door — Perched, and sat, and nothing more.Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore —Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,Though its answer little meaning— little relevancy bore;For we cannot help agreeing that no living human beingEver yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door —Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as "Nevermore.” - Edgar Allan Poe
3. “No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.” - Charlotte Brontë
4. “A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.” - Philip K. Dick
5. “Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death.” - Jane Austen
6. “She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes--clearly her father's--were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.” - Bernard Malamud
7. “Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you`ll keep faith in me, you`ll remember who we are, and you`ll never feel despair.” - Ann Brashares
8. “So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it.” - Herman Melville
9. “God can inject hope into a absolutely hopeless situation.” - Mark Evans
10. “For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.” - Cox, Michael
11. “Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?” - James Patterson
12. “Days, weeks, months, years," said the boy. "Minutes and hours and seconds. I don't know about any of those things.” - Tim Bowler
13. “In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.” - Peter Kreeft
14. “A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” - Albert Camus
15. “Even in the grave, all is not lost.” - Edgar Allan Poe
16. “If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgement.” - Robert A. Heinlein
17. “One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. “There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-” - Michael Cunningham
19. “There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.” - Kate Chopin
20. “Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.” - Kouta Hirano
21. “Any fool can hope when success lies plainly in view. It wants genuine strength to hope when matters are hopeless.” - Michael Flynn
22. “When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.” - Christopher Hitchens
23. “I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves on bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears.” - David Rakoff
24. “Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.” - Laini Taylor
25. “My fate is like those envelopes – sealed and tossed aside.” - Jenny B. Jones
26. “It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.” - H. Rider Haggard
27. “If you have ever felt hopeless hang on The night you’re enduring may seem long but there is joy coming in the morning. Incredible changes are going to take place in your life as you begin to relinquish your past and renew your present.” - Sue Augustine
28. “I want to encourage you by letting you know that there’s hope for you and your situation whatever you are dealing with. God is intimately involved with every detail of your future and His desire is for you to be an overcomer.” - Sue Augustine
29. “...he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears into the sea.” - Henryk Sienkiewicz
30. “He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt” - Henryk Sienkiewicz
31. “[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.” - Christine de Pizan
32. “He pulled the gun from his waist, running it along my cheek and back down to my lips. I blinked back the tears at sick game. He finally stopped the gun at my temple, my pulse fighting against the pressure of the cold metal of the gun.“Do you think you are a good person, Kendall?”“No, not at all,” I said, swallowing down the misery of my honest answer.“Really?” he asked, one eyebrow lifting in confusion. “Are you afraid to die?”I wished I could spit in his face for making everything so hard. I wished he would just pull the trigger and end it already. But a small part of me was begging and pleading internally that he wouldn’t shoot me.“No, I’m not afraid to die,” I admitted, I closed my eyes and the tears fell quickly. “I’m not afraid of much in life. I’ve seen too much to be scared.”He let out a sigh. I opened my eyes. He pulled the gun away from me.“Well, damn. How the hell am I supposed to kill someone so miserable?”I looked away. Even in death I was pitiful.” - Holly Hood
33. “I made a sorry face in response to such strong insistence, but I couldn’t believe him. Fantasies were exactly that―fantasies. Whimsy. Wishes. Mere castles in the sky without foundation or substance. Dreams didn’t come true. To believe so would be to believe falsely, to surrender to madness, to give in to an unreliable hope that would crush me once again as it always, always did!” - Richelle E. Goodrich
34. “The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.” - George Orwell
35. “I am as silent as death. Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever. And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can't. I can't.” - Beth Revis
36. “For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each time Quinn came in, they continued to talk about it. In the winter, the talk was of trades, predictions, memories. During the season, it was always the most recent game. They were both Mets fans, and the hopelessness of that passion had created a bond between them.” - Paul Auster
37. “You can break a man with hope.” - Kate Morgenroth
38. “Elizabeth's barreness and advanced age--a double symbol of hopelessness--became the means by which God would announce to the world that nothing is impossible for Him.” - Swindoll Charles R.
39. “We began our hospital visits: one day Susan, one day me, everyday The Big Hoom. On one of these visits, she told me about the tap that opened at my birth and the lack drip filling her up, and it tore a hole in my heart. If this was what she could manage with a single sentence, what did thirsty years of marriage do to The Big Hoom?” - Jerry Pinto
40. “I often think of death. True. Suicide is a reasonable option. True. My sins are unpardonable.I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I leave it blank.” - james frey
41. “I’d always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth.” - Alma Katsu
42. “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing” - Guy de Maupassant
43. “Why does a human body become deceased?The reason is that as long as the human body is not free from suffering, mind cannot be happy. If a man lacks enthusiasm, either his body or mind is in a deceased condition.... Now what saps the enthusiasm in man? If there is no enthusiasm, life becomes drudgery - a mere burden to be dragged. Nothing can be achieved if there is no enthusiasm. The main reason for this lack of enthusiasm on the part of a man is that an individual looses the hope of getting an opportunity to elevate himself. Hopelessness leads to lack of enthusiasm. The mind in such cases becomes deceased.... When is enthusiasm created? When one breaths an atmosphere where one is sure of getting the legitimate reward for one's labor, only then one feels enriched by enthusiasm and inspiration.” - Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
44. “There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
45. “Your hope is the most beautiful and the saddest in the world.” - Naomi Benaron
46. “Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.His fairy story.” - John Fowles
47. “...and her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back.” - Janette Rallison
48. “I kept hoping because she couldn’t afford to lose hope. I kept my faith so she wouldn’t lose hers.” - K. Howard Joslin
49. “Man is under all conditons immersed in a sea of God's blessings. Therefore, be thou not hopeless under any circumstances, but rather be firm in thy hope” - Abdu'l-Baha
50. “Yes, victors are our strongest. They're the ones who survived the arena and slipped the noose of poverty that strangles the rest of us. They, or should I say we, are the very embodiment of hope where there is no hope. And now twenty-three of us will be killed to show how even that hope was an illusion.” - Suzanne Collins
51. “I’ve learned a lot about love over these last months. And part of what I’ve learned is that you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head.” - Zoë Marriott
52. “I do not view suicide as wicked, just terribly sad. There is only one death, but it is like a stone cast into a pond - the ripples stretch far. Such an act must leave a burden of sorrow, guilt, shame and confusion on an entire family. A natural death, such as my father suffered, is hard enough to deal with. A decision to end one's life must be still more devastating for those left behind. I cannot imagine the degree of hopelessness someone must feel to contemplate such an act.” - Juliet Marillier
53. “My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
54. “There is a point when the anguished soul finally despairs. A moment in life when the heart, the will, even the spirit crumbles. Some say that after much grief and drowning in tears, it is possible to pick up the pieces and carefully repair what was shattered. I say nay. For the chains of despair have no key, and the soul destroyed by that monster can never hope to be unaffected. There are things done that cannot be undone.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
55. “Rainy, gloomy, drab, sunless day. There are times when hope seems entirely clouded over, when looking for the blessings in your circumstances feels like trying to catch a ray of sunshine from six feet under.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
56. “Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.” - C.S. Lewis
57. “Spoilers followI started reading the third act of Hamlet, and I got about two pages in when I realized there's no point.I am never going back to school.I am never going to the university.I am never going to watch wolves stalk through the northern forests or elephants graze on the savanna. I am never going to have sex or get married or raise a family. I'm never going to have a first apartment, a first house, a first car. I'm never” - Megan Crewe
58. “And I laugh at myself for thinking I could touch the sky.” - Ally Condie
59. “In 2008, I was the woman who thought she had the world by the tail: the "perfect life." In 2010, I was the woman without hope who thought she had no life left to live. Which woman am I today? Neither. Both were illusions.” - Julie-Anne
60. “Trees lose their leaves in blizzards like these.” - Ashly Lorenzana
61. “I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below.” - Ashly Lorenzana
62. “I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls.” - Ashly Lorenzana
63. “The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.” - Elie Wiesel
64. “where there is no more hope, song remains.” - Victor Hugo
65. “I have given up on speech with the Rev; there is no use explaining that you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. My trust, even down in that dark place I carry, is that some person will come running. And then finally the way through grief is grieving.” - Jane Hamilton
66. “All's well that ends well.''Assuming there's an end somewhere,' Aomame said.Tamaru formed some short creases near his mouth that were faintly reminiscent of a smile. 'There has to be an end somewhere. It's just that nothing's labeled "This is the end." Is the top rung of a ladder labeled "This is the last rung. Please don't step higher than this'?"Aomame shook her head.'It's the same thing,' Tamaru said.Aomame said, 'If you use common sense and keep your eyes open, it becomes clear enough where the end is.'Tamaru nodded. 'And even if it doesn't' -- he made a falling gesture with his finger -- 'the end is right there.” - Haruki Murakami
67. “You’ve had many ordeals in the past. During these ordeals, life seemed unbearable. You may have collapsed from the exhaustion of hopelessness and curled into a fetal position. Regardless of how difficult this new ordeal may be, as with the others, this too will be overcome. It will make you stronger.” - John-Talmage Mathis
