Quotes About Pessimism

Hoop nodded. "Everything's good." "For now," Ripley said. "Only for now. Nothing stays good for long. Not ever.

There is only one thing you have to know about the future: everything gets worse.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

To some extent this area was foreshadowed by pioneering humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote about the self-actualized or fulfilled person, and Carl Rogers, who once noted that he was pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about people.

That was the problem with Europeans. No optimism, too often they looked for things that would go wrong instead of right.

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're scrambled.

All good things must someday end. Fortunately, this is also true of bad things.

The world gels better every day -- then worse again in the evening.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.

The worst can always be true," Papa said grimly.

The glass can be half empty or half full." Leni knew the glass was broken.

In conclusion, the good can be made better; the bad remains bad.

Life is excellent or life blows, depending on how you look at it.

A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism….With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

Facing this undesirable result, the highly educated Negro often grows sour. He becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion. Often when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the pioneering Negro who is at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

I'm not being pessimistic at all. I think God will eventually destroy this technological civilization. I'm very optimistic about that.

You're awful." "I'm honest. It's the world that's awful.

I learned long ago that conservation has no victories, that one must retain connections and remain involved with animals and places that have captured the heart, to prevent their destruction. I am sometimes asked why, given a world that is more wounded and scarred, I do not simply give up, burdened by pessimism. But conservation is my life, I must retain hope

Pessimism is as American as apple pie. Frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

One of my clients told me the story of the optimist and the pessimist who were arguing about philosophy. The optimist declares,"This is the best of all possible worlds." The pessimist sighs and says, "You're right.

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another, and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

When a man is gloomy, everything seems to go wrong; when he is cheerful, everything seems right!