Quotes About Optimism

We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope.

It has been a difficult road this year, but still I look at every day as a new opportunity.

I was taught to think the next week or month or year will only get better than it is today. So I just keep waiting to see how great it will get!

Success, for me, is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.

The mere fact that so many continue to rise, year after year, out of just such conditions as you may think are fatal to your advancement, ought to convince you that you also can conquer your environment.

Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We'll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I'm very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.

Every successful person I have heard of has done the best he could with the conditions as he found them, and not waited until next year for better.

So I'm going to tell you, it's going to be a good year. There are good players all over this country, and it is our job as a scouting department to find them, draft them, sign them, develop them, and help us to continue to win championships. So it's going to be a good year.

Even failures can turn into something positive if you just keep going. I wrote a television pilot called 'Head of the Family.' CBS didn't want it. It was considered a failure. But we reworked it. A year later, it became 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'

The farther we go down a negative path, which we see every day, the more we yearn for the positive.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Why be negative when you can enjoy life and be positive? That's something I learned over the years.

There have been ups and downs over the years, but that's in the past, and now I'm just looking forward and focussed on the future ahead.

My grandmother lived to 104 years old, and part of her success was she woke up every morning to a brand new day. She said every morning is a new gift. Her favorite hobby was collecting birthdays.

It gets better: there's a light at the end of the tunnel. It may take one day, it may take ten years. But one day, you will find happiness if you manifest it. Put that energy out, and it'll come back.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

If you believe that your best years are behind you, you've guaranteed they are; I'm going to dance into that good night, with the oldies turned up loud.

Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.

Every time I am stuck in traffic, stub my toe, get a middle seat on the flight, I just remember how all of this is just a blip in the radar of my life.

I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don't. I want a guy down there who's just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it's going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.

A lot of tragedy can befall us, but there's always something else; there's always hope.

I've had a very happy life, and although I have had tragedy, I've never suffered from any darkness.

The Lusitania is a monument to this optimism, to the hubris of the era. I love that, because where there is hubris, there is tragedy.

I can't say my life has been dominated by tragedy. I refuse to accept that. I've had less than some, more than others.