quotations about hope
The near cousin of optimism is hope: knowing the steps needed to get to a goal and having the energy to pursue those steps. It is a primal motivating force, and its absence is paralyzing.
DANIEL GOLEMAN
Working With Emotional Intelligence
One thing you cannot know:
The sudden extinction of every alternative,
The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope:
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you
Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless
Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.
T. S. ELIOT
The Family Reunion
Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgment.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Who turns away from gazing at the sun
Sees its dusk images fill all the air.
It is not otherwise when Hope is done:
Her darkling phantoms make the heaven of Despair.
EDITH MATILDA THOMAS
"When Hope Is Done"
Hope is really just a variety of fear, all the more painful because it twitches a chance of escape in front of your nose as it slides by.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Where there is no hope there can be no endeavour.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Hope, deceitful as it is, carries us through life agreeably enough.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
A man begins to die when he ceases to expect anything from Tomorrow.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
At home or abroad, on land, on sea, in prosperity or in adversity, hope's beaming star ever lights us, sometimes feeble, but oftener bright; sometimes weak, but oftener strong. Hope is the murderer's cell, and with the shipwrecked mariner on the desert isle; in the palace, and in the cot; it is shining with surpassing splendour by the dying bed of the Christian, and flickering round the couch of the infidel. Hope met our first parents in Eden, and will be with the last man on earth. Hope is part of our immortality; we hope on, and we hope ever.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Hope", Short Essays
We should expect hope's reciprocity as a natural flowering of the life of hope. Helping others and nurturing hope is expressive of hopefulness itself. It is an extension of the hopeful self to reach out to others, promoting the connection of agency and the enrichment of horizons of meaning. Hope's reciprocity grows out of the very social nature of hope; we thus frequently see it live in family relations, in intimacy, in love. And so hope spreads. This spreading should not surprise us; like love, it is freely given, fostered, and nurtured.
PATRIC SHADE
Habits of Hope
What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
He who has never hoped can never despair.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Caesar and Cleopatra
To the last moment of his breath
On hope the wretch relies;
And e'en the pang preceding death
Bids expectation rise.
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Captivity
Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see--in the mind's eye--a path to a better future.
JEROME GROOPMAN
The Anatomy of Hope
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
OUIDA
A Village Commune
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
Every dead hope is a phantom that grimaces over its tomb.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The White Feet of the Morrow"
Hope is a flatterer; but the most upright of parasites; for she frequents the poor man's hut, as well as the palace of his superior.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Conversations with Goethe