Quotes About Pessimism

My parents said marrying was an optimistic thing to do in pessimistic times.

I'm pessimistic. I don't think that justice always gets the right person.

I am sort of pessimistic in that way where I often think the worst of people.

I get very confused about being called a comedian, because when you say 'I'm a comedian,' people expect you to crack a joke. Maybe I use laughter and humour to make people think. I don't know what you call that - a humourist? A satirist? A pessimistic comedian? I don't know. Satirists can be very dark.

I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes.

People do like to talk us down, it's a Scottish thing. We are pessimistic, we look for the negatives all the time.

I can be very pessimistic and very dark, but there is also a part of me that's very determinedly optimistic.

It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author's job to point it out.

We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.

In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.

I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.

Psychologists even have a term for this: they talk about 'mean world syndrome'. People who have just seen too much of the news have become more cynical, more pessimistic, more anxious, even more depressive. So, yeah, I think that is something you need to be wary of.

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining factor in the life of each. It determines as to whether it is a life of power or of impotence, of peace or of pain, of success or of failure.

Each of us must decide: Am I a fun-loving Tigger or am I a sad-sack Eeyore? Pick a camp.

Another way to be prepared is to think negatively.

Fearful people always find reasons to confirm their worst fears.

I'm Chicken Little and always imagine the worse.

I'm rather a cynic, I suppose. I do not believe in the niceness of humanity.

I look at all good things with a bit of a dark lens, I suppose, especially with something like love.

I wouldn't say that I relax and enjoy anything. But I think my pessimism helps. I never really expect anything good to happen, so when it does, it's a nice surprise.

I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.

High IQ individuals don't like surprises and are pessimistic, because it's logical.

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.