Quotes About Pessimism

To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that's both excessive and uncomfortable.

Man is nothing but a coagulation of mud and shit ... equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or crab-louse

It's never as good as it feels, and it's never as bad as it seems.

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

I can't enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole, I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree.

A people whose souls are so little tuned to joy.

With the sole exception of President Bill Clinton, whose 'bridge to the 21st century' evoked the vision and optimism of other great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, such as FDR and John F. Kennedy, pessimism about America's economic future has been the hallmark of modern progressivism.

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

I thought all my life that optimists and pessimists pass away the same way, so why be a pessimist?

People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.

Grownups have a tendency to talk themselves out of things, saying it will never work, but kids are fabulously optimistic.

I do see the world in pretty dark terms. I find it colder and scarier the older I get.

All of everything we've ever done has been riding on low expectations. 'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,' a terrible idea. Doing '21 Jump Street' as a movie is a terrible idea. 'The Lego Movie' sounds like a terrible idea.

Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral.

My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn't optimism.

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard.

you imagine the worst, and when you do, your mind stops at the problem and does not consider the solution.

But there is another type, one who goes about the world cadaverously, cheeks sunken, bones jutting, and one senses that he so disapproves of the whole of the world that he begrudges every bit of it that he takes inside himself. At that moment I would have wagered that Galen had never truly enjoyed one bite of food or one swallow of drink in his life.

I was realising that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.

Nothing is as good as it seems, and nothing is as bad as it seems. Somewhere in between lies realty.

He knew too much to be an optimist, and not enough to relieve his pessimism.

This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America's potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

Obviously, you can't control everything, but you are obliged to take care of the few things you can. I'm an optimist, basically, who acts like a pessimist. On principle. Just in case.