Top 100 Quotes About Pessimism
#1. Talkativeness is a symptom of deep-seated pessimism. Without it there would be no pessimistic literature.
Albert Vigoleis Thelen
#2. Remember to recognize the small successes that you will have. Don't let the brightness of that big goal blind you to what happens on the way toward the goal. Meet one wave at a time and enjoy what progress you make. I want you please not to be taken up in the undertow of pessimism.
Lucille Ball
#3. 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
#4. Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.
Martin Seligman
#5. As the nation at last confronts global warming, it is no time for denial, greed, cynicism or pessimism.
Bernie Sanders
#6. 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
#7. Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.
John Ortberg
#8. Cease negative mental chattering. If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.
Bruce Lee
#9. Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
Freeman Dyson
#10. The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#11. There's probably a little greater case for pessimism than optimism. But I do not rule out optimism.
Jim Leach
#12. To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#13. Life ... as God intended it enables us to live above the drag of fear, superstition, shame, pessimism, guilt, anxiety, worry, and all the negativity that keeps people from seizing each day as a gift from Him.
Charles R. Swindoll
#14. I think, instead of the pessimism of the Remain campaign, we have an opportunity to think of the next generation. If we have faith in their talent, in their generosity, in their hard work, we can, if we leave the E.U., ensure the next generation makes this country once more truly great.
Michael Gove
#15. I have lived through many wars and have lost everything many times Yet, life is beautiful, and I have so much to learn and enjoy. I have no space nor time for pessimism and hate.
Alice Herz-Sommer
#16. The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#17. Do you think I leapt at this pessimism, grasped it as sweetly smug superior thing.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#18. Many young Muslims see no opportunities for themselves and do not feel they have control over their lives or a stake in their nation's future. Such pessimism leads to disengagement. We risk losing a generation of young Muslims to apathy and extremism.
Najib Razak
#20. 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
#22. In securing the future of the planet, we secure happiness for ourselves. One of the aims of the Greens is to turn around the tide of pessimism amongst the young people of the world.
Bob Brown
#23. Pessimism is a losing strategy. Leadership demands both confidence and optimism in abundance.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
#24. Hope transforms pessimism into optimism. Hope is invincible.
Daisaku Ikeda
#25. pessimism works because it's self-fulfilling: if you're a slacker with low expectations, they'll probably be met.
Peter Thiel
#26. It is the hopeful, buoyant, cheerful attitude of mind that wins. Optimism is a success builder; pessimism an achievement killer.
Orison Swett Marden
#27. Though there are many differences between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, they are strikingly similar in their poor economic records and even more so in their shared pessimism and bearishness on America.
David Limbaugh
#28. Open you eyes to the world around you.. Block out the screams of pessimism.. Release your inhibitions!
Nike Thaddeus
#29. 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
#30. Pessimism is a product of our civilization. It is not natural to the savage; he feels pain, or discomfort, and suffers from these palpable conditions, but when he recovers from wounds he forgets the torments, and when he is well fed he is joyous in the light of day.
Arthur Lynch
#31. In good times, pessimism is a luxury; but in bad times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling and fatal prophecy.
David Brin
#32. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
David Benioff
#33. The thing about pessimism is that in most cases it's nothing more than a front behind which a body can hide its most sweetful yet painful hopes. please forgive mine.
Eric Clapton
#34. All our anxieties relate to time ... The major problems of psychiatry revolve around an analysis of the despair, pessimism, melancholy, and complexes that are the inheritances of what has been or with the fears, anxieties, worries, that are the imaginings of what will be.
Fulton J. Sheen
#35. 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
#36. Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective.
Francis Parker Yockey
#37. Between optimism and pessimism, there is confidence in God.
Edmund Campion
#38. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.
Ian McEwan
#40. Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.
John Ortberg
#41. Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.
David Deutsch
#42. I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?
Peter Lynch
#43. 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
#45. It's fashionable in some circles to be pessimistic about America, about conservative solutions, about the Republican Party. I utterly reject that pessimism.
Mitt Romney
#46. Despite the immense challenges that we have faced and continue to face, we refuse to indulge in negativity or pessimism.
We are an organization that believes in empowering people to be their best.
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
#47. Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
Ellen Glasgow
#49. 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
#50. ,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me".
David Michie
#51. My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.
Stanislaw Lem
#52. Hope is not naive, and hope is not an opiate. Hope may be the single greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and against a culture of despair.
Sharon Brous
#53. Zionism and pessimism are not compatible.
Golda Meir
#54. I myself find him a master of utterly terminal pessimism, appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do. We are pollution. He wants us to feel no pity for Homo sapiens, and so excludes appealing women and children from his tales.
Kurt Vonnegut
#55. The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing.
Steven Morrissey
#58. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?
Francis Parker Yockey
#59. 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
#60. Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#61. As a student of conservation biology, I believe that characteristics with survival value will ultimately prevail. There is no survival value in pessimism. If you think failure is inevitable, that view will probably become self-fulfilling.
Denis Hayes
#62. You better watch out, or you're going to be defeated by pessimism!
Matthew Quick
#63. The low-hanging fruit is cynicism and pessimism, and it's there if you want it. You can reach out and you can grab it, you don't even have to make any effort.
Emilio Estevez
#64. Pessimism is the one ism which kills the soul.
John Buchan
#65. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it
Oscar Wilde
#66. Criticism and pessimism destroy families, undermine institutions of all kinds, defeat nearly everyone, and spread a shroud of gloom over entire nations.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#68. Let us not give in to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil offers us every day.
Pope Francis
#69. Fear is born in uncertainty and nourished by pessimism.
Lois Wyse
#70. Optimism may sometimes be delusional, but pessimism is always delusional.
Alan Cohen
#71. Sexual pessimism and hostility toward the pleasures of the flesh are a legacy from the ancient world which Christianity has preserved in a special measure to this day.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann
#72. Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
#73. One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
Ian McEwan
#74. I don't think you lead by pessimism and cynicism. I think you lead by optimism and enthusiasm and energy.
Patricia Ireland
#75. If only media people would stop reaching for the low-hanging fruit, which is cynicism and pessimism, and stopped trying so hard to be hip and cool and have a swagger.
Emilio Estevez
#76. Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
Jaron Lanier
#77. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
Howard Zinn
#78. Germany's Angela Merkel exudes an atmosphere of elderly exhaustion and pooped-out pessimism. Britain's David Cameron, though by nature exuberant, feels he has to look and sound glum. And France's leader, Francois Hollande, seems determined to drive every successful businessman out of the country.
Paul Johnson
#79. But pessimism and reality are usually mistaken for each other
Anna Banks
#80. I had always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under noisiness, and for ever wails his chant of lugubrious pessimism.
Erskine Childers
#81. When the outlook is steeped in pessimism, I remind myself, "Two and two still make four, and you can't keep humankind down for long."
Bernard Baruch
#82. The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn't that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#83. Finally, develop tenacity and an optimistic outlook. It doesn't mean that everything will always work out or that you won't suffer. But pessimism seems to be designed to force you to suffer before the fact!
William Foege
#84. You know, the pessimism which exists now in the Middle East existed in Northern Ireland, but we stayed at it.
George J. Mitchell
#85. It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ...
Adrienne Rich
#86. Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism ... [because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.
Price Pritchett
#87. The refuge from pessimism is the good men and women at any time existing in the world, -they keep faith and happiness alive.
Charles Eliot Norton
#88. Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
Bill Bryson
#89. I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.
Clint Eastwood
#91. Insufficient nourishment in the early morning leads to pessimism and doubts.
Elizabeth Goudge
#92. I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism.
Andrew Mellon
#93. I say, choose faith. Choose faith over doubt, choose faith over fear, choose faith over the unknown and the unseen, and choose faith over pessimism.
Dallin H. Oaks
#95. Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#96. There's nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.
David Rakoff
#97. If I had learned one thing in life, it was that pessimism hurt only the ones that could not and did not want to be optimistic. -Alexis Summers
K.M. Golland
#98. I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.
Antony Beevor
#99. Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.
George Orwell
#100. What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing
Willem Lange
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
