Quotes About Pessimism

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington.

Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.

Negative energy is wasteful.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.

I don't have a Pollyana attitude toward life that claims everything is lovely.

I'd like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things.

If only media people would stop reaching for the low-hanging fruit, which is cynicism and pessimism, and stopped trying so hard to be hip and cool and have a swagger.

Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.

I have that glass-half-empty syndrome, and it takes a great deal of effort to climb out of the hole of darkness that I choose to live in mentally.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

Niet dat ik mij niet voor alle zekerheid altijd al met een flinke dosis pessimisme gewapend heb. En wat heb ik er nu aan? Geen malle moer. Het leven is zo inconsideraat dat je net zo goed optimist kunt zijn: heb je meer plezier ook. Toch, veel samen gelukkig geweest, godverdomme. Wat een rotstreek.

Hope springs eternal. Just remember: so does evil. Sometimes they are impossible to tell apart.

pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

He smacked his lips, tasting the fifth brand, and holding up the glass looked through the amber at the light. "This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant. So far, none of this is sewage.

A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Así piensa el bogotano. Eso piensa. «Que, salvo mi casa de dos pisos, la ciudad siga siendo una cloaca». «Que todos, menos yo, cojan una neumonía de estas que están arrasando con la ciudad». «Que si finalmente se va a caer Bogotá, hoy lunes 31 de agosto, que entonces se les caiga sólo a ellos».

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), the great American essayist, said "nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm." What a deconstructed culture lacks, because of its deep cynicism and pessimism about reality, is a basic confidence and enthusiasm that is necessary to start almost anything.

No good news awaits I warned you right at the start Turn away, reader

Betty and Shirley looked doubtfully at the pale figure of Edith in the stark hospital bed. She didn't look like someone who was intending to improve. They had expected tubes and fluids and other unpleasant things, but Edith was unadorned by anything medical and looked as though she was awaiting the embalmer.

Bah, cynics, said Dr. Meescham. Cynics are people who are afraid to believe.

Do not hope; instead, observe" were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.

Hope is never a foolish thing—although others will tell you it is.