Quotes About Pessimism

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.

Exhaustion usually feeds negative thinking.

All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it.

once told me this thing about brain chemistry, the nub of it being that when you're feeling good, you can't ever imagine feeling bad again. And when you're feeling bad, it's impossible to imagine a time when you won't be circling the drain.

You know," Melanie says, "most of the time things turn out well." "You're wrong. Most of the time things do not turn out well, and when they do, it's dangerous to expect that to last.

Human existence must be a kind of error. It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens." My own philosophy was a little cheerier than Schopenhauer's

Cynicism, to me, is trying to make people as unhappy as you are.

There are people who are unhappy with everything.

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

A pessimist says all women are loose. An optimist does not, but he has hopes.

I'm more than open to hope, but I think men and women have a difficult time dealing with each other and often take the low road.

The storm is the optimist's friend, but the pessimist's nightmare.

Thunder is noise to a pessimist but music to an optimist.

Once you start rooting against somebody, you're always going to look for the negative in everything they do.

Every day starts, my eyes open and I reload the program of misery. I open my eyes, remember who I am, what I'm like, and I just go, 'Ugh'.

I'm finding myself increasingly attracted to literature that starts with pessimism as it's leading point and goes from there.

I said we are in a mental recession. We keep getting the steady drumbeat of bad news... it's become a mental recession. We don't have measured negative growth. That's a fact, that's not a commentary.

It is my argument that reversing the meaning of "populist" tells us something important about the people who reversed it: denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that pessimism—that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn—that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly.

This can sound rather grim, but it does have a positive flip-side: It suggests that our negative assessments of other people are less likely than our positive assessments to be correct, and we should give our foes another chance.

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.

optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind

the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.