Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Greene

“Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair” has the clipped, moral-muscle rhythm of Elizabethan drama: two clauses, two hard W sounds, a neat little engine of cause and consequence. Greene, a playwright steeped in the era’s obsession with prodigality and downfall, compresses an entire cautionary arc into a single line. “Waste” isn’t just trash or inefficiency; in Greene’s world it’s lavishness, sexual excess, squandered youth, the kind of spending (of money, virtue, time) that signals a character losing the plot of their own life. “Woe” arrives not as bad luck but as the invoice.

The second half is the sharper psychological turn. “Sorrow hates despair” sounds paradoxical until you hear the stagecraft: sorrow is painful but still active, still tethered to care, still capable of movement. Despair is the emotional end state where plot stops, where repentance, revenge, and reconciliation all become impossible because the character has surrendered agency. Greene’s line insists on a hierarchy of suffering: sorrow may grieve, but it refuses the nihilism of despair because despair is unproductive, theatrically and morally. It’s a warning to the audience as much as the character: feel your losses, but don’t romanticize the collapse.

Contextually, it fits a culture anxious about overindulgence in a rapidly commercializing London, and a theater that loved watching appetites snowball into catastrophe. Greene, whose own biography is often read as a tale of excess and repentance, gives the audience a maxim that doubles as self-indictment: waste isn’t a vibe; it’s a fate.