Quotes About Attitude

See it? Oh, I have no interest in seeing it. Seeing it might get in the way of my opinion.

But then that's humans for you—never can trust the stroppy fuckers to live up to the stereotypes you assign.

And why are we supposed to be serious about God? Did God show up and crack the whip? "You there, Annie in Ohio, I see you laughing a lot and frankly it really pisses Me off . . . " (50)

We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic. SUSAN JEFFERS

Optimism is a practiced choice.

the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we make a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make the changes that you suggest.

If a tourist enters a food stall thinking he's going to be cheated, the salesman will sense this and obligingly cheat him. But if a Frenchman senses that a visitor is delighted to be in his store, and takes a genuine interest in what is for sale, then he'll just open up like a flower.

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.

You've got to be responsible for your own happiness - you can't expect it to come flopping through the door like a parcel.

I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's out of step.

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.

He said that there were three preconditions for happiness — stupidity, selfishness and good health

Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: "If you lower your expectations, you can't be disappointed." This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

To be a stoic in an age of self-pity is to be judged standoffish; worse, unfeeling.

There can be a complacency to failure as much as a complacency to success.

Alice was surprised. In her worldview, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn't much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game.

the happiest people on earth were said to be the Danes. Not because of their supposed hedonism, but because of the modesty of their expressed hopes. Instead of aiming for the stars and the moon, their ambition was only to reach the next streetlamp and, being pleased when they did so, were the happier for it. He

She preferred to be at the receiving end of envy than pity.

Nonchalance, she could have told Argosy, does not pay.

husband laughed at Justin. She didn't

The young fought sleep, she thought, but the old relished it, and at the moment, she felt absolutely ancient.

Mas o cinismo persistente deixa uma pessoa rabugenta e, em demasia, pode provocar estragos duradouros no nosso coração.