quotations about hope
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
Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
Blind hope faces a blank wall waiting for a door in it to open. Doors might be nearby, but blind hope keeps you from locating them.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Hope in the Dark
Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it's the middle that counts the most. Try to remember that when you find yourself at a new beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up, and it will.
BIRDEE PRUITT
Hope Floats
Hope is like a northern hawthorn bush, late flowering but continuing long in bloom. There is an element of speculation in it which faith quite lacks. Thus, faith is for youth, hope for middle life, and charity, which only comes when faith and hope are dead, for age.
B. CUNNINGHAM GRAHAM
Hope
He who has never hoped can never despair.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Caesar and Cleopatra
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
OUIDA
A Village Commune
Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today--with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jan. 3, 2008
Man ever talks, and Man ever dreams
Of better days that are yet to be,
After glittering goal, that distant gleams,
Running and racing untiringly.
The worldly may grow old and young as it will,
But the Hope of man is Improvement still.
Hope bears him into life in her arms,
She flutters around the boy's young bloom,
The soul of youth with her magic warms,
Nor rests with age in the silent tomb;
For ends man his weary course at the grave,
There plants he Hope o'er his ashes to wave.
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
"Hope"
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 was a dangerous emotion that more often than not led men into foolishness and peril, made them risk their lives and lose their wives and part with fortunes that they never recovered.
BENTLEY LITTLE
The Policy
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
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
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
ANN PATCHETT
State of Wonder
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
Where there is no hope there can be no endeavour.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Conversations with Goethe
The deepest dark reveals the starriest hope.
GERALD MASSEY
"Long Expected"
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
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