Quotes About Optimism

I believe good plans are the best way to maximize fun, avoid disaster, and possibly, save the world. I spend a lot of my time making them.

I have learned that no matter how bad, how really rotten your life gets - I mean,like,it just couldn't get any worse - there is always hope." -Pamela Collins

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

It was as though the world had had a fresh coat of paint, and every heart acquired a store of illusions that made the burden of life less hard to bear.

But this was classic Sam—he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

But then again, maybe 'I will' is nicer. It has the future in it. 'I do' just has the present.

Sam's grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it's one of our games, but sometimes, it's any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I'm feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.

Tomorrow," she said, "we try again. We fail again. We do better.

he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

As Sam often said to Sadie, "Why make anything if you don't believe it could be great?

The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I'm feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.

Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.

1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.

Next time, we fail better.

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

Real change, though, is forgiving enough to take a little failure, strong enough to take despair in small doses.

You know, Young, this is as good as anything gets. I wonder if this is it? Is this the very best day I'll ever have? (122)

With a trampoline heart she saw the Bridge to her left: its modern shape, its optimistic uparching. Familiar from postcards and television commercials, here now, here-now, was the very thing itself, neat and enthralling. There were tiny flags on top and the silhouetted ant forms of people arduously climbing the steep bow. It looked stamped against the sky, as if nothing could remove it. It looked indelible. A coathanger, guidebooks said, but it was so much grander than this implied.

I want to have everything. And I don't see why I can't.