quotations about optimism
Optimism is the spice of Life. It is the Science and Art of Life. It teaches us to know Life as it really is, and not as the vile stench of fever vapours which rise from the pestilential marsh, nor the distorted grotesque visions which come from a warped and disordered brain or liver. It teaches us to live. Not like bestial denizens of an under-world, but like Olympian Joves with a Greece and Athens at our feet, the powers of nature at our command and the laurel crown of rationality on our brows.
MEREDITH F. TITTERINGTON
"Is Optimism Irrational?", The Plebs Magazine, February 1910
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
This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Pessimist and Optimist"
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
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
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
I feel the matter of my heart being transformed, metallized, in an optimism of steel.
F. T. MARINETTI
The Steel Alcove
I'm no optimist ... I'm just a realist who smiles too much.
TIFFANY REISZ
The Siren
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
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
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
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
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
Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Optimism is cowardice.
OSWALD SPENGLER
Man and Technics
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
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