89 Bleak Quotes

Following is our list of bleak quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about bleak house.

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Famous Bleak Quotes

The lonely sunsets flare forlorn Down valleys dreadly desolate; The lonely mountains soar in scorn As still as death, as stern as fate. — Robert W. Service

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! — John Milton

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November! — Thomas Hood

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for. — Haruki Murakami

Weather forecast for tonight: dark. - George Carlin

Weather forecast for tonight: dark. — George Carlin

The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all? — Mark Manson

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams. — Claude Debussy

beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade — William Ernest Henley

No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness. — Wilfred Owen

A desert is a place without expectation. — Nadine Gordimer

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose — Elena Ferrante

Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud. — Sophocles

This world that I live in is empty and cold/the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul. — Sayings

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational. — Bertrand Russell

Short Bleak Quotes

  • Dont ever lose hope. Even when life seems bleak and hopeless, know that you are not alone. — Nancy Reagan
  • T is liberty crowns Britannia's Isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. — Joseph Addison
  • And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. — Edgar Allan Poe
  • Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert. — Kahlil Gibran
  • We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope — Jacques Yves Cousteau
  • The people who change the world never lose hope no matter how bleak the outcome might appear to be. — Laurence Overmire
  • Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. — Nick Hornby
  • Envy is the coward side of Hate, And all her ways are bleak and desolate. — Charles Caleb Colton
  • No terrain is too bleak, no distance too far that it will stop God from rescuing His own. — Lynn Austin
  • The universe, he observed, makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid. — Charles Dickens

The Future Is Bleak Quotes

I think because the show ["Grant MacLaren"] is essentially a hopeful show. The show says that as bleak as the future is, the one thing that mankind developed was the ability to send their consciousness back and where a lot of the institutions of modern life have fallen apart. — Eric McCormack

Because no matter how much money we spend there [in Iraq], as long as the people there see this money as... as assistance that is unwelcome, as long as they continue to be humiliated in their own country by us... I mean, the future looked bleak, and the future after that was in fact very bleak. — Yaroslav Trofimov

If a 25-year old can't read and write and he or she isn't gaining marketable skills, it doesn't matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House. His or her future will be bleak. — J. C. Watts

When you do well in school as a young person you can foresee a bountiful future for yourself. When you don't do well, the future you see is bleak. It's tough to find an honour student in trouble with the law. We have to feel that we're of value and we get that from people reacting to our prudence. — George Chuvalo

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past. — Arthur Golden

At some point he has to show that he has a vision of a better way. He can't just say 'The future is bleak, follow me.' Because no one will. — Mark McKinnon

The science is crystal clear: we humans are the primary cause of global warming, and we face a bleak future if we fail to act quickly. — Joseph J. Romm

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins — Anne Lamott

I honestly don't know, but if America continues to refuse to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, I see a bleak future not only for American society, but for the world as a whole. This is a global problem that is not going away, and the United States is an obstacle to solving it. — Peter Singer

Bleak House Quotes

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies. — Charles Dickens

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. — Charles Dickens

But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat. — Charles Dickens

And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself. — Charles Dickens

Constancy in love is a good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. — Charles Dickens

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it. — Simon Callow

What most people find festive-a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night-I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd. — Jancee Dunn

The plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground. — Charles Dickens

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. — Charles Dickens

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell. — Charles Dickens

People Writing About Bleak

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Robert W. Service

Robert W. Service
quotes on leadership

34 668
Read quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley
quotes on love, nature and death

427 3175
Read quotes by John Milton

John Milton
quotes on love, death and freedom of speech

780 4024
Read quotes by Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood
quotes on education, life and slavery

91 770
Read quotes by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami
quotes on life, love and writing

983 5346
Read quotes by George Carlin

George Carlin
quotes on humanity, life and death

932 11627

More Bleak Quotes

Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up. — Allen Klein

The main idea in golf as in life, I suppose is to learn to accept what cannot be altered and to keep on doing one's own reasoned and resolute best whether the prospect be bleak or rosy. — Bobby Jones

I don't deliberately look for something dark or bleak or disconnected, in fact that's not something I'm even conscious of in the work as I'm making it. I'm always trying to create beauty, reveal hope, show the sense of longing that exists in isolation and loneliness, and capture the search for something greater inside all of my subjects. — Gregory Crewdson

If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work. — Jacques Yves Cousteau

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar. — George Saunders

When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope. — Pittacus Lore

I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality. — John Kennedy Toole

That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope. — Mary Karr

To not have any hope is where things start to get really bleak. Things are possible. The impossible can be possible. — Sarah Paulson

The thing about tourism is just that it's incredibly powerful. It's like a gun and it's incredibly easy to be irresponsible with it. And the speed of the impact that tourism can have on a place can be quite breathtaking. It doesn't take years, it takes months. That's how quickly it works. And it can be quite a bleak thing to witness. — Alex Garland

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut. — Gary Larson

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 borrow From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Leonore - For the rare and radiant maiden who the angels name Lenore - Nameless here for evermore. — Edgar Allan Poe

I know for sure that everything will work out. No matter how crazy or bleak the situation is, it will work out. Everything passes, good and bad. — Xosha Roquemore

If you turned the fabric of our lives over, I imagined the design on the backside would be woven in the bleak grays of doubt and fear. — Stephenie Meyer

Although love dwells in gorgeous palaces, and sumptuous apartments, more willingly than in miserable and desolate cottages, it cannot be denied but that he sometimes causes his power to be felt in the gloomy recesses of forests, among the most bleak and rugged mountains, and in the dreary caves of a desert. — Giovanni Boccaccio

the whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail. — M.C. Beaton

Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice. — Oliver Stone

I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch. — James D. Watson

He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetness of spirit did not exist. — Jack London

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

No matter how hopeless or bleak things appear, the moment always comes when suddenly our spirit revives, and hope is reborn. That is why we must never give up. — Daisaku Ikeda

My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was – liberty. — Charlotte Bronte

Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings. — Arthur Conan Doyle

We live in a pretty bleak time. I feel that in the air. Everything is uncertain. Everything feels like its on the precipice of some major transformation, whether we like it or not. — Sean Lennon

Ah, passing few are they who speak, Wild, stormy month! in praise of thee; Yet though thy winds are loud and bleak, Thou art a welcome month to me. For thou, to northern lands, again The glad and glorious sun dost bring, And thou hast joined the gentle train And wear'st the gentle name of Spring. — William C. Bryant

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek. — Robinson Jeffers

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these. — Charles Dickens

We laughed a lot. That's one thing we forgot about for a few years - laughing. When we went through all the lawsuits, it looked as if everything was bleak, but when I think back to before that, I remember we used to laugh all the time. — George Harrison

Half-baked effort is almost as good as no effort put in at all. Always seek to do your best. Good things always have a way of finding those who put forth their best even when their situation seems bleak. — Chris Erickson

Some girls look beautiful with no makeup on at all. I call them lazy. Now go throw some war paint on you bleak empty canvas you. — Dane Cook

I knew the poor, I knew the hideous death they die, when famine lays its bleak hand on the door; I knew the rich, sated with merriment, who yet are sad. — Hilda Doolittle

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. — Susan Sontag

In Conclusion

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