“So long as you’re struggling, quarreling, there can’t be despair. Despair is one of the supreme sins, because a despairing person ceases to struggle. That makes despair the ultimate defeat; it is death. It has a feeling of completeness to it, closely connected to smugness: the despairing person makes no attempt to move from the point he is at—no attempt to change himself or the world—and this completeness is a mark of dying. Dying is completion.”

Adin Steinsaltz, via Sunbeams (Page 142)