Quotes About Pessimism

The dry high spirits of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists look damp and depressed.

You used to be optimistic. You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Even after we came back from the north, you used to think that. Now you're cautious, you're anxious… You're pessimistic. She knew he was right, but it wasn't right that he should speak to her accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for. I used to be young, was all she could find to say.

You used to be optimistic. You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Even after we came back from the north, you used to think that. Now you're cautious, you're anxious…you're pessimistic." She knew he was right, but it wasn't right that he should speak to her so accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for. "I used to be young," was all she could find to say.

Whenever I read history, I feel as though I am hopelessly surrounded by hopelessly stupid people.

With many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early twenty-first century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.

The bad can be found in anything. It is so much easier to find than the good.

Discouragement. Defeat. Impossible. Too hard. All alone. Give up. Isolated. Estranged. Withdrawn. Cut off. Desolate. Depressed. Depleted. Unfulfilling. Pessimistic. Careless. Humorless. Meaningless. Absurd. Pointless. Helpless. Failure. Too tired. Despair. Confused. Forgetful. Fatalistic. Too late. Too old. Too young. Mechanical. Doomed. Negative. Forlorn. Useless. Lost. Senseless. Bleak. Blasé.

No," I corrected her, "I'm not a misogynist, I'm a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally.

Ozzie Boone...insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or shotguns, Professor Takuda was a remarkably cheerful man.

To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimist's right but an activist's indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done (xxxiv).

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it

Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps.

People don't believe in positive changes anymore.

If I don't watch the news in a day, I think the potential for humanity is incredible. But anytime I look at the news, I'm like, 'We're in really big trouble.'

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists.

Scepticism and pessimism aren't synonymous. Scepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.

We conclude that most of the time, the future will look a lot like the past, with both up cycles and down cycles. There is a right time to argue that things will be better, and that's when the market is on its backside and everyone is selling things at giveaway prices. It's dangerous when the market's at record levels to reach for a positive rationalisation that has never held true in the past.

But to be true to God's Word, optimism must always be optimism in God's power combined with a healthy pessimism in our own abilities. God can do all things with or without us; without him, we can do nothing (compare Ps. 127:1–3).

The assertiveness of German nationalism at the turn of the century was in no small measure aggression born of fear – not just the traditional antagonism towards the French and the growing rivalry with Great Britain, but also the presumed threat seen in the Slavic east, and, internally, the perceived looming menace of Social Democracy, and culturally pessimistic worries about national degeneration and decline.

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

Man after the second half of the twentieth century is frustrated. You know that the foundation of all subversiveness is laid on frustration and this frustration keeps finding ways to subversive activities. And you also know that an uncert...ain present has made man pessimistic about future... therefore he runs after anything that glitters, be it fire

La mente dell'uomo è contorta e in genere lo spinge a credere sempre alla peggiore delle ipotesi

Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.