Quotes About Optimism

You have never seen ugliness in a happy face.

My little Asticot, I have abjured absinthe and forsworn cafés. I have broken my new porcelain pipe and have cut my finger-nails. As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

One joy scatters a hundred griefs.

A smile will gain you ten more years of life

A clever person turns great troubles into little ones and little ones into none at all.

Every smile makes you a day younger.

Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts, while adversity is often as the rain of spring.

One happiness scatters a thousand sorrows.

Yes, there will be winter, there will be cold, there will be snowstorms, but then there will be spring again...

This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.

One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they're already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.

What's working and how can we do more of it?" That's the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)

What's least commonsensical is that pits can sometimes be flipped into peaks.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?

When you engineer early successes, what you're really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort.

achieving success requires some failures along the way. Don't beat yourself up when those failures occur.

instill hope and optimism and excitement

That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It's easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.