Quotes About Hope

We are all sent the dreams we yearn for, she thought; no matter how unhappy or fraught our waking world may be, we are sent dreams in which we can do the things the heart really wants us to do.

Stand on your toe. That is what one said in Setswana if one hoped that something would happen. It was the same as the expression which white people used: cross your fingers.

Love] may bring surprise, joy, despair and, occasionally, perfect happiness.

When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.

Yes, thought Mma Ramotswe, the world can be very discouraging. But we cannot sit and think about all the things that have gone wrong, or could go wrong. There was no point in doing that...There was much for which we could be grateful, whatever the sorrows of this world.

A firefly came into view against the warm darkness. Then it went off, darting and dipping erratically -- out into the night, a tiny pinpoint of light, which, at the end of the day, is all that is needed.

Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they're often pleasantly surprised.

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

The queue for happiness was not well ordered, he thought; it stretched out and wound round corners, and sometimes, it seemed, the end was so hard to see.

The world was not perfect -- it never had been and never would be; it was full of pitfalls and problems, of fear, of regrets, and of bitter tears. Here and there, though, there were tiny points of light, hard to see at times, but there nonetheless, like the welcoming lights of home in the darkness. The flames that made these lights were hard to ignite, but occasionally, very occasionally, we found that we had in our hands the match that could be struck to start one of these fires. p. 197

Some people mocked you if you said that you joined others when your time came. Well, they could laugh, those clever people, but we surely had to hope, and a life without hope of any sort was no life: it was a sky without stars, a landscape of sorrow and emptiness.

She liked such stories because it helped people to believe in justice, which we had to believe in if we were not simply to give up in the face of adversity.

None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.

Sometimes there were doubts, and those doubts could persist, but often you really had no choice. You had to feel your way through the complexities of this life and hope, just hope, that you got it right more often than you got it wrong.

Elle avait ainsi gardé cette éventualité à l'esprit, enfouie parmi ces autres fragments d'espoir avec lesquels nous traversons la vie, sans y penser beaucoup, mais résolus à ne pas les laisser tout à fait s'évanouir.

Il va arriver. Quand il aura fini de danser avec de jeunes demoiselles ou de faire ce qu'il est en train de faire, il viendra.

The most that many people could hope for was that they should not incur the wrath of gods whom they had failed to appease or propitiate; beyond that, gods should be left to get on with their proper business and mortals with theirs.

She had lost her baby, and where was she? She hoped that her baby was happy and would be waiting for her when she left Botswana and went to heaven. Would Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni get round to naming a wedding date before then? She hoped so, although he certainly seemed to be taking his time. Perhaps they could get married in heaven, if he left it too late. That would certainly be cheaper.

There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.

But there were many things that one did not really believe that one did not want to disbelieve, just in case they might be true – which they clearly were not, of course.

Things start badly—very badly—and then they change for the better and those who have nothing, or who are unhappy, or who live in fear, suddenly find that these things that were bad for them have gone." "It's like rain," said Mma Potokwane, who had not said much but had clearly been affected by the story. "The rains come and they wash everything away. The dryness, the thirst, the dust on your skin—these are washed away, Mma, all washed away.

You know something?" he said to Jamie. "I've never believed in God, but I do believe in his love.

She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought.

Skepticism had its place, but we should not lose sight of the possibility that some beliefs were both necessary and beneficial--a belief in human goodness being a prime example of this. There were plenty of grounds to doubt human goodness; but if one ceased to believe in it, then we would lose the comfort of trust. And people needed their scraps of comfort in this world if they were to be able to deal with hardship and disappointment.