Quotes About Pessimism And Optimism

#1. 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

#2. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?

Francis Parker Yockey

#3. I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.

Wole Soyinka

#4. 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

#5. 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

#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. The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#8. 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

#9. Pessimism is a losing strategy. Leadership demands both confidence and optimism in abundance.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

#10. 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

#11. Between optimism and pessimism, there is confidence in God.

Edmund Campion

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

#18. Success is found balanced between optimism and realism, where it is unhindered by the weight of pessimism.

Wes Fesler

#19. With the sole exception of President Bill Clinton, whose 'bridge to the 21st century' evoked the vision and optimism of other great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, such as FDR and John F. Kennedy, pessimism about America's economic future has been the hallmark of modern progressivism.

Bernard L. Schwartz

#20. in recent years, some psychologists have reached the conclusion that pessimism may often be as healthy and productive as optimism. At

Oliver Burkeman

#21. All the people we loved, who have died, are still alive in the past. The only thing that really separates us is time. It's a matter of perspective. That's what separates optimism and pessimism.

Diana Palmer

#22. Some people see the liquid and thing half full. Others only see the air and think half empty. Sometimes I get the sense Chatham sees it all, which is kind of terrifying. I don't know if I want him to see me--the real me.

McCall Hoyle

#23. 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

#24. It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ...

Adrienne Rich

#25. I don't think you lead by pessimism and cynicism. I think you lead by optimism and enthusiasm and energy.

Patricia Ireland

#26. I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

Criss Jami

#27. Pessimists try to convince you the world sucks, optimists already know it does and smile anyway.

Jonathan Harnisch

#28. A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

George Bernard Shaw

#29. Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency.

David Myers

#30. 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

#31. 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.

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

Thomas L. Friedman

#35. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell

#36. 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

#37. A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley

#38. The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Pat Conroy

#39. Pessimism has never done anything but tear down and destroy what optimism has built up.

Orison Swett Marden

#40. 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

#41. Reciprocal illusions: the pessimist's fear and the optimist's hope.

Marty Rubin

#42. Disappointment focuses on 'what is not,' and completely misses the far greater reality of 'what now is.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#43. 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

#44. There must be logical minds among all species if they hope to survive. Not everyone can be bridled with hope and optimism.

Kayla Krantz

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Inspiration moves one from Pessimism to Optimism, from Doubt to Faith, from Despair to Hope, and from Darkness to Light!-RVM

R.v.m.

#48. I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

Doris Lessing

#49. Every optimistic path will take you farther, faster, and to greater altitude than any road of pessimism.

Wes Fesler

#50. 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

#51. (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

#52. 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