Top 100 Optimism Pessimism Quotes
#1. Optimism, pessimism, f**k that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.
Elon Musk
#2. Hope transforms pessimism into optimism. Hope is invincible.
Daisaku Ikeda
#3. It is the hopeful, buoyant, cheerful attitude of mind that wins. Optimism is a success builder; pessimism an achievement killer.
Orison Swett Marden
#4. Pessimism is a losing strategy. Leadership demands both confidence and optimism in abundance.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
#6. If there is a sort of national American emotion I would call it optimism. If there is an English one I would call it embarrassment - not even pessimism - just sheer shame, embarrassment and confusion.
Stephen Fry
#7. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
#8. To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#9. There's probably a little greater case for pessimism than optimism. But I do not rule out optimism.
Jim Leach
#10. The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#11. The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.
Marcel Proust
#12. Man's inclination to justice makes democracy possible; but man's capacity for injustice makes it necessary.' The optimism we need to prevent ourselves from destroying our own democratic freedoms and, indeed, our own human habitat must be based on reasoned pessimism.
Bernard Crick
#13. Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.
NikNak
#14. If you live feeling like
Your glass is half empty, well,
It may as well be empty all the way.
Mattie J.T. Stepanek
#15. Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.
William Shakespeare
#16. I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.
Wole Soyinka
#17. It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.
Hector Hugh Munro
#18. With no positivity, there is no hope; with no negativity, there is no improvement.
Criss Jami
#19. Optimism is a seed sown in the soil of faith; pessimism is a seed hoarded in the vault of doubt.
William Arthur Ward
#20. Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration.
Steve Toltz
#21. In optimism there is magic. In pessimism there is nothing.
Esther Hicks
#22. A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston S. Churchill
#23. We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves; fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future.
Michel De Montaigne
#24. Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is nessessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man's power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom.
Richard Rodriguez
#25. Reciprocal illusions: the pessimist's fear and the optimist's hope.
Marty Rubin
#26. I believe in optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. But my hope is the people, the society, which is ahead of the government.
Elif Safak
#27. Between optimism and pessimism, there is confidence in God.
Edmund Campion
#28. The spirit of the gospel is optimistic; it trusts in God and looks on the bright side of things. The opposite or pessimistic spirit drags men down and away from God, looks on the dark side, murmurs, complains, and is slow to yield obedience.
Orson F. Whitney
#29. Masturbation = Imagination + Activity. Worry = Imagination + Negativity.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#30. When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.
Geraldine Brooks
#31. To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make!
Criss Jami
#32. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?
Francis Parker Yockey
#33. The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. The pessimist may call the optimist a fool; but who is more foolish, the happy individual who expects more happiness or the one who fills his life with bitterness and has only more despair to look forward to?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#35. We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better.
Peter Thiel
#37. Disappointment is really just a term for our refusal to look on the bright side.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#39. Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism.
Criss Jami
#40. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.
Samuel Ullman
#41. For you the cup isn't half full or half empty, you're always topping it up.
Rowena Cory Daniells
#42. I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. Life is not a matter for simple optimism
for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism
for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.
Rollo May
#44. What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide.
"That is because I know what life is," said Martin.
Voltaire
#45. The cup is both half full and half empty; it has never been one or the other. Stop obsessing over the trivial cup and drink the medicine you've been given.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#46. I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
Antonio Gramsci
#47. If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Albert Camus
#48. So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.
Shalom Auslander
#49. It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.
Miguel De Unamuno
#50. Thankfulness is an attitude of possibilities, not an attitude of liabilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#51. Open you eyes to the world around you.. Block out the screams of pessimism.. Release your inhibitions!
Nike Thaddeus
#52. We are optimists by instinct, pessimists by thought.
Marty Rubin
#53. Life belongs to optimists. Pessimists are just viewers. Making it real, starts with our attitude.
Cathy Burnham Martin
#54. A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Aldous Huxley
#55. Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. I always got out before the euphoria.
Jennifer Handford
#56. We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there's always another bottom underneath the one we're laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there's always endless opportunity above us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#57. Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience".
"What's pessimism?" I said.
"Religion without God.
Jonathan Kellerman
#58. Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
Norman Cousins
#59. We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
#60. The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.
Mark Twain
#61. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
#62. In the Soviet Union we have a saying, a pessimist is someone who believes things can't get any worse. An optimist thinks maybe they can.
Abel Aganbegyan
#63. Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.
Thomas L. Friedman
#64. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
David Landes
#65. It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty. I am gonna drink it through this crazy straw.
Joey Comeau
#66. Don't ever let desperation take the seat of inspiration in you! Always live inspired no matter what! For though something might be wrong somewhere, something is always right somewhere! If you have life, be alive and smile!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#67. Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses.
Alphonse Karr
#68. Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
Idries Shah
#69. Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.
Edith Hamilton
#70. Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
William James
#71. Pessimism does win us great happy moments.
Max Beerbohm
#72. Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
Oscar Wilde
#73. Only God is able. It is faith in Him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#74. It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.
Michael Chabon
#75. Pessimism has its own secret
Share of optimism in it too.
Angela Suba
#76. Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency.
David Myers
#77. I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed.
Tamar Myers
#78. The optimistic nature finds joy in the very feeling for life; the pessimistic nature finds a feeling for life only in joy.
Lou Andreas-Salome
#79. The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy.
Helen Keller
#80. Every optimistic path will take you farther, faster, and to greater altitude than any road of pessimism.
Wes Fesler
#81. If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.
Philip K. Dick
#82. I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing
#83. Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.
Erich Fromm
#84. Inspiration moves one from Pessimism to Optimism, from Doubt to Faith, from Despair to Hope, and from Darkness to Light!-RVM
R.v.m.
#85. All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.
Rachel Kushner
#86. I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#87. There must be logical minds among all species if they hope to survive. Not everyone can be bridled with hope and optimism.
Kayla Krantz
#88. Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses - or with a new set of ideological filters.
George Weigel
#89. (Billy) Graham went through passages of hypochondria and his closest friends had to assure him that he was not about to die.
Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy
#90. Disappointment focuses on 'what is not,' and completely misses the far greater reality of 'what now is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#91. A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw
#92. To a pessimist, losing bobby pins is as hopeless as losing hair.
To an optimist, losing hair gives hope to get the lost bobby pins back.
Munia Khan
#93. No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won't make it worse. (Apr 2007 Gen Conf)
Jeffrey R. Holland
#94. It is our non negotiable responsibility to always stay positive, no matter what! The only thing that can make you negative is the thing you allow to make you negative! Think well and stay positive!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#95. Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.
Bruce Springsteen
#96. You predicted quick victory. Now it's going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don't you know any better than that by now?
Jim Butcher
#97. Pessimism has never done anything but tear down and destroy what optimism has built up.
Orison Swett Marden
#99. Blending hard-bitten realism with long-view optimism, Obama said that every 20 or 30 years brings a new cycle of pessimism in America.
Ron Fournier
#100. The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
Pat Conroy
