quotations about optimism
I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist ... or maybe even a pessimist. The glass has water in it; that's all I know.
CLAY AIKEN
interview, Ability Magazine
Because optimism does at times with some ill-balanced natures lead to disaster, is that anything against optimism? Not at all, that is no more against optimism than that it could be claimed that foolhardiness is against courage. Foolhardiness is an unreasoning exhibition of a valuable human instinct, but neither courage nor optimism are to be condemned, because, acting without proper control, they may lead to melancholy results. The credulous ignorant optimist may find his ruin among the swindles of the company promoter, but that is no more an indictment of optimism than that such a foolhardy feat as looping the loop is a reflection upon courage. No, optimism is no more to be reckoned by its failures than courage by the desperate ventures of foolhardiness.
FRANK CHALLEN
"Optimism: The Creed of Progress", The Westminster Review, September 1904
I resolved that, like the sun, as long as my day lasted, I would look on the bright side of everything.
THOMAS HOOD
preface, The Works of Thomas Hood
Optimism is the tendency to look on the bright side of things; it is the belief that the bright side is the natural side; it is the belief that the sum total of the forces at work in the world are making for righteousness; it is the belief that man is so constituted that one sunshiny day makes him forget many cloudy days by which it was preceded.
ELWIN BIRD JOHNSON
An Optimistic Equation and Other Optimism
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
ELLEN WILLIS
"Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism", Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade
There is abundant reason to believe that optimism -- big, little, and in between -- is useful to a person because positive expectations can be self-fulfilling.
CHRISTOPHER PETERSON
American Psychologist, January 2000
Optimism is cowardice.
OSWALD SPENGLER
Man and Technics
Unsatisfied desire is the characteristic feature of human life. That is the common fact out of which both pessimism and optimism are constructed. Dwell on the impossibility of ever getting a state of complete and permanent satisfaction with what you have, and you become a pessimist. Dwell on the opportunity for endless growth and conquest which this same fact makes possible, and you become an optimist.
WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
The Art of Optimism
That had to have been the fakest attempt at optimism since my fourth grade teacher tried reasoning that we were better off without the dead kids in our class because it'd mean more turns on the playground swings for the rest of us.
ALEXANDRA BRACKEN
The Darkest Minds
Optimists don't internalize pain or criticism. They take it for what it is worth and carry on.
ROBERT M. SHERFIELD
The Everything Self-Esteem Book
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER
Out of My Life and Thought
I feel the matter of my heart being transformed, metallized, in an optimism of steel.
F. T. MARINETTI
The Steel Alcove
Despite the cautions just raised, there is abundant reason to believe that optimism -- big, little, and in between -- is useful to a person because positive expectations can be self-fulfilling.
CHRISTOPHER PETERSON
American Psychologist
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
I'm just saying when tragedy strikes, we have to look on the bright side. You know? Like how even used Mercedes still have leather seats.
CORDELIA
"Teacher's Pet", Buffy the Vampire Slayer
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
OSCAR WILDE
Lady Windermere's Fan
Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
What is hope but a feeling of optimism, a thought that says things will improve, it won't always be bleak, there's a way to rise above the present circumstances. Hope is an internal awareness that you do not have to suffer forever, and that somehow, somewhere there is a remedy for despair that you will come upon if you can only maintain this expectancy in your heart.
WAYNE W. DYER
There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem