Quotes About Pessimism

As a screenwriter and a half-Jew, I tend to look at the glass half-empty.

Sometimes I feel my glass is a bit half empty and I am a bit Eeyore-ish.

On a good day, I'm a bitter, angry, chip-on-my-shoulder type of guy.

You say you're a pessimist, but I happen to know that you're in the habit of practicing your flute for two hours every evening.

The tragic artist is not a pessimist — it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian.

Modern pessimism is an expression of the uselessness of the modern world — not of the world and of existence.

Life is a dark chain of events.

In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless.

When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, have you grown old.

If fortune favors you do not be elated; if she frowns do not despond.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

They say in the Middle East a pessimist is simply an optimist with experience.

I have friends who are very pessimistic. They say you can't possibly be an optimist nowadays. But I think, taking the longer view, you can still be as optimistic as you want.

I am not a big fan of positive thinking. The term suggests that there is something negative that you have to counteract by being positive. That is an artificial duality.

The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

Your vision makes your world. If you see the world as a happy, loving place, then that's where you're going to live. But if you see the world as a messed up, negative, and dangerous place, then that will be your reality.

People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.

Anytime things were going right for you, the future of the world seemed bright. Anytime they were going wrong, the imminent collapse of civilization was at hand. Can't you see how thoroughly you projected your own subjective vision of reality on the world?

I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren't going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

For many, negative thinking is a habit which, over time, becomes an addiction.

Men are a hundred times worse than you can imagine. We are thinking the worst, shallowest thoughts, all the time.