Quotes About Optimism

Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won't leave until led out by marshals.

Brother Mingo made some good points, Lander said. We can't save everyone. But that doesn't mean we can't try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing's going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, 'This is not enough.' But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don't.

An optimist is a braver cynic.

That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.

He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place. and he was in the habit of hoping for it.

So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself. In

A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn't. (356)

How can hope live in the same words as the most crushing despair?

Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp's tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, "Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!" (How much suffering there is to get through!).

I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.

In contrast to most of the existentialist schools of thought, logotherapy is in no way pessimistic; but it is realistic in that it faces the tragic triad of human existence: pain, death, and guilt.

that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up, quite suddenly, at least for the individual. For instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working

It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.

The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back.

one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them.

The basis for any predictions would be represented by biological, psychological or sociological conditions. Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

O mundo está numa situação ruim. Porém tudo vai piorar ainda mais se cada um de nós não fizer o melhor que pode.

Bismarck: «La vida es como visitar al dentista. Siempre crees que lo peor aún está por llegar, cuando en realidad ya ha pasado».

It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. … The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future—sub specie aeternitatis.

Como quien se agarra a un clavo ardiendo, dado mi innato optimismo (que tantas veces me ha ayudado a controlar mis sentimientos, incluso en las situaciones más desesperadas)