quotations about hope
Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.
LEMONY SNICKET
The Beatrice Letters
The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.
MARIAN ZIMMER BRADLEY
The Fall of Atlantis
It is better to hope than to mope!
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The season of bereavement becomes the seed-time of hope.
HARRY GREY
Sorrow Not Without Hope
And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
For Self-Examination
Hope is the destroyer of things.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Hope hath a large mouth.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
For hope will cull a withered flower
And tune a harp with a broken string;
And hope will shed a glimmering ray
Of light on pleasure's ruined shrine.
For mouldering columns still look gay
When summer sunbeams o'er them shine.
ROSA VERTNER JEFFREY
"Hopes and Fears"
We can have hope even while maintaining a negative--or sometimes simply realistic--attitude. For instance, if you're dying of cancer, you can still hope for pain relief. If you have a difficult-to-treat cancer, you can still hope for new treatments.
LORI HOPE
Help Me Live
Hope, whose whisper would have given
Balm to all my frenzied pain,
Stretched her wings, and soared to heaven,
Went, and ne'er returned again!
EMILY BRONTE
Hope
Those who live for hope alone find that the immediate future always slips from their grasp.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
In hopelessness there is always hope.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
VACLAV HAVEL
Disturbing the Peace
Hope is, indeed, a deceitful enchantress; but she sheds a sweet radiance on the stream of life, and never exerts her magic except to our advantage. We seldom attain what she beckons us to pursue; but her deceptions resemble those which the dying husbandman in the fable practiced upon his sons, who, by telling them of a hidden mass of wealth, which he had buried in a secret place in his vineyard, led them so sedulously to delve the ground, and turn up the earth about the roots of the vines, that they found, in deed, a treasure, though not in gold, in wine.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer
Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.
PAULO FREIRE
Pedagogy of Hope
What doctor possesses such curative resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope?
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Hope is not a strategy.
RICK PAGE
Hope Is Not a Strategy