Quotes About Optimism

I'm tired of feeling mad. I'm tired of feeling sad. . . I just want things to be okay again.

I generally played a little fast and loose with my resources but I figured hell, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, especially in a stupid board game.

I have a good feeling about this. Somehow, it's all going to turn out for the best." "I wish I did," Cork said. "Maybe that's the difference between the law and religion. I hope for the best, you're prepared for the worst.

At the heart of most things that look bad is something that can be good and useful.

In all my life I've learned two things." He pointed to the black patch over his eye. "One is never call a small man in a uniform 'Shorty.' The other is that nothing is ever hopeless.

That is one thing love does. It tests us in difficult ways. But love is also fear's worst enemy. In what is ahead of you, hold to your love and not your fear. And when you imagine, imagine the best of what might be.

Worry and you open the door to the worst of possibilities, Niece. Better, I think, to hope. The heart invites a friendlier spirit for its company.

The campus was Disney-fascist, a relentlessly upbeat place to wither and die.

He's no failure. He's not dead yet.

The postman said there were two ways of meeting experience—you could expect pain or you could expect happiness. "Now, I'm going to look on the bright side until I know to the contrary," he said. "I'm going to look on the bright side, and keep saying everything's going to come out the way I want it to.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

As a magician, I think everything is possible. And I think if something is done by one person it can be done by others.

An optimist was someone who believed that however complicated or random or odd a stretching curve might seem, if we had enough insight then we could understand the simple guiding principle from which it actually came. The concept then spread from mathematics to mean anyone who believes that such an optimal path can open up in life.

In good times, pessimism is a luxury; but in bad times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling and fatal prophecy.

People tend to overstate my resilience, but, of course, I hope they're right.

I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

While we may not awaken to a perfect, pristine world in our natural bodies, we can awaken to a "brand-new day" in our minds and hearts.

If you can't do anything about it, laugh like hell.

We can have an American president who does not govern with negativism and fear of the future.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever

Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.