A Quote by David Whyte
There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
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Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can't take quiet desperation!
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
If you give a discount there's a desperation there and I like to substitute desperation with service and real quality. And the desperation goes away.
Somehow it is the male's duty to put the best years of his life into work he doesn't like in order that he may "retire" and enjoy himself as soon as he is too old to do so. This is more than just the system - it is the credo. It is the same thing that prompted Thoreau to say, in 1839: 'The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'
...desperation can toy with you and if you give desperation any wiggle room, it will find alternative answers
Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
People used to live lives of quiet desperation - now they go on talk shows!
Any life he'd ever heard of, his own included, was burdened with emotions - love, loss, jobs, jealousy, money, death, pain. But if you were Jewish, always there was this extra one, the added pull at your endurance, the one more thing. There was that line in Thoreau about 'quiet desperation' - that was indeed true of most men. But for some men and women, for some fathers and mothers and children, the world still contrived that one extra test, endless and unrelenting.
The gift of willingness is the only thing that stands between the quiet desperation of a disingenuous life and the actualization of unexpressed potential.
'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
I don't think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain't desperate at some point, you ain't interesting.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cöoperates, and therefore it is not in vain. But alas! each relaxing and desperation is an instinct too. To be active, well, happy, implies courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.
Do you know what's one mistake we always make? Believing that life's immutable, that once you get on a particular track you have to follow it to the end of the line. But it appears that fate has more imagination than we do. Just when you think you're in a situation you can't escape from, when you've reached the lowest depths of total desperation, everything changes as fast as a gust of wind, everything's overturned; from one second to the next you find you're living a new life.
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