Top 100 The Optimist Quotes
#1. The phenomenal thing that happened to me is that I was able to create two memorable men: one is the ultimate optimist, Rocky, and then you have Rambo, the ultimate pessimist. You're going to always be remembered for them, no matter what you do.
Sylvester Stallone
#2. This is the picture of the spirit world. It is the world of the optimist. The pessimist has no share in its great glory, because he refuses to accept the possibility which is the nature of life. Thus he denies to himself all he desires, and even the possibility of achieving his desires.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#3. So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. The pessimist focuses on the storm;
the optimist looks forward to the rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#5. In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning
Carl Sandburg
#7. An optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.
Ada Leverson
#8. I try not to be too optimistic or pessimistic. If you're a pessimist then that's depressing all the time; if you're an optimist and things don't work out then that's depressing, too.
Nicholas Hoult
#9. So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist ... If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.
Thomas L. Friedman
#11. I'm no optimist", she said as she opened the cabinet door. " I'm just a realist who smiles too much.
Tiffany Reisz
#12. I am a cynical optimist. Big opening weekends are like cotton candy. The films you will remember over time are the films that stick in the consciousness of the audience in a good way.
Robert Redford
#13. 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
#14. In choosing a partner, always pick the optimist.
Tony Lema
#16. You're the optimist all the way through, pretending to be a pessimist on the inside, because you can act like it hurts less if you say you knew all along it was going to go down like that.
Amy Jo Cousins
#17. Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive.
Mark Twain
#18. I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool, an optimist must know what a sad place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.
Peter Ustinov
#19. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
#20. An optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.
Milan Kundera
#21. Optimists focus on the place they are going. Pessimists focus on the obstacles along the route. To become an optimist simply look ahead.
Simon Sinek
#22. It was a lot to hope for, but Holden was an unapologetic optimist. Give people the information they need. Trust them to do the right thing. He didn't know any other way to play it. Or
James S.A. Corey
#23. Although much that was precious has been taken from me in this life, I have reason to remain an optimist. After the numerous tight scrapes I've been through, by now I should have lost one leg, three fingers, one buttock, most of my teeth, an ear, my spleen, and my sense of fun. But here I am.
Dean Koontz
#24. A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
Beau Willimon
#25. I am an optimist. I believe the future is bright. I think people who see life painted in dark colors are the ones who do not take ownership.
Maelle Gavet
#26. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
Lesslie Newbigin
#27. The belief in miracles that all men cherish is born of immoderate indulgence in hope. There are people who go on hope sprees periodically and we all know the chronic hope drunkard that is held up before us as an exemplary optimist. Tip-takers are all they really are
Anonymous
#28. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.
Cheryl Strayed
#29. I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn't born into it.
Paullina Simons
#30. I am very fortunate. I am a glass-half-full eternal optimist type to the point of being a moron. But I would never presume to know how hard it goes for others. How, for some people, just getting though the day is an incredible effort that can hardly be borne.
John Niven
#31. Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.
Graham Greene
#32. An optimist is merely an ex-pessimist with his pockets full of money, his digestion in good condition, and his wife in the country.
Helen Rowland
#33. Don't ever become a pessimist ... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.
Robert A. Heinlein
#34. The pessimist waits for better times, and expects to keep on waiting; the optimist goes to work with the best that is at hand now, and proceeds to create better times.
Christian D. Larson
#35. You can do anything you think you can. This knowledge is literally the gift of the gods, for through it you can solve every human problem. It should make of you an incurable optimist. It is the open door.
Robert Collier
#36. In the long run, the pessimist may be proven right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.
Daniel Reardon
#37. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward
#38. The strategist chooses the shortest path while the leader chooses the path through which he learns something new.
Bogdan Vaida
#39. I'm an optimist about the power of technology to transform lives for the better.
Julius Genachowski
#40. Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future.
Jeanette Lee
#41. The deep breathe you just took to show that your problems are bigger than you, is the final breathe someone had taken right now in his life! As long as your breathe is not the final one, you still have a hope!
Israelmore Ayivor
#42. Optimism is not inherently a superior way of viewing the world. Certainly doctors will say it might be better for one's physical health to be an optimist. But, morally speaking it may not be appropriate in certain circumstances.
Todd Solondz
#43. I'll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless; the English that life is hopeless but not serious.
Amanda Craig
#44. The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility.
P.G. Wodehouse
#45. Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.
Terry Pratchett
#46. An optimist is someone who figures that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's the bluebird of happiness.
Robert Breault
#47. The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light - and the next tunnel.
Sydney J. Harris
#48. I may be the optimist and you may be the Pessimist
but you can never put a puzzle together
with the two of the same pieces.
Austin V. Songer
#49. Our notion of an optimist is a man who knowing that each year was worse than the preceding, thinks next year will be better. And a pessimist is a man who knows the next year can't be worse than the last one.
Franklin P. Adams
#50. It seems melancholy weather."
"I prefer to think of it more as weather designed for reflection."
"You are the eternal optimist.
Lorraine Heath
#51. An optimist is a driver who thinks that empty space at the curb won't have a hydrant beside it.
Jules Renard
#52. I am an optimist and when I am too sure of something or someone, well, of course it turns out that I am wrong
.. at other situations, I imagine the worst and needless to say, I am again wrong
Sanhita Baruah
#53. I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-woo l possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant.
Frances Moore Lappe
#54. To be a member of the Labor Party is to be an optimist - optimistic about the future of Australia, optimistic about the ability of government to make a difference.
Kevin Rudd
#55. Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!
Oscar Wilde
#56. I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.
Martin Rees
#57. The optimist sees the future as a rabbit sees the oncoming truck - getting bigger, not closer.
Steve Aylett
#58. A pessimist finds the darkness around the light but an optimist becomes the light in the darkness.
Debasish Mridha
#59. It reinforced everything that I believe. I am an optimist. I believe in the goodness of people.
John Waters
#60. My father is undoubtedly one of the nicest, kindest, smartest, and warm-hearted people I know. He is truly a light that shines on this earth, and to know him is to love him. He is also the eternal optimist.
Jenna Morasca
#61. I would say that Barack Obama has always been a real optimist about what can be accomplished. He believes that government can be used to create systemic, long-term, real change. And the first lady is more of a skeptic.
Jodi Kantor
#62. Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
#63. The optimist, as you probably know, is a person who, when he wears out his shoes, just figures he's back on his feet.
Hartman Rector Jr.
#64. He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
Lyn Nofziger
#65. The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.
Kahlil Gibran
#66. 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
#67. I am an optimist and I believe that together we shall be able now to make the right historical choice so as not to miss the great chance at the turn of centuries and millenia and make the current extremely difficult transition to a peaceful world order.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#68. I am an optimist ... I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.
Tom Hiddleston
#69. Hypocrisy is a quality found in others. I am an optimist. I believe that saying the right thing will eventually cause people to do the right thing for me.
Bauvard
#70. Sometimes it's not the light in a person you fall in love with, but the dark. Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#71. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
Helen Keller
#72. I am an optimist because I don't see the point in being anything else.
Abraham Lincoln
#73. I'm enough of an optimist and a patriot to believe that in U.S. you have a lot of opportunity and can do pretty much anything you want in some form. For me, the idea of failure is far preferable to the idea of regret.
Michael Ian Black
#74. A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him.
Helen Keller
#75. I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
Arthur C. Clarke
#76. It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word 'pessimist' was not in our vocabulary at that time. It's a modern 'invention' which I believe we should 'dis-invent.'
Zig Ziglar
#77. I think of myself as a doom person. I'm a worrier. But I like the idea of being an optimist. Maybe I'm the kind of optimist who deep down knows it's not going to work.
Owen Wilson
#78. The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come
Peter Ustinov
#79. I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after.
Cat Stevens
#80. I'm an optimist, so I think everything can be worked out and fixed. But from having cancer I learned that even if you're even an optimist, sometimes you just have to face the facts that certain things are broken.
Hoda Kotb
#81. Here's hoping all the days ahead, won't be as bitter as the one's behind you. Be an optimist instead, and somehow happiness will find you.
Ray Davies
#82. The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.
Cherrie Moraga
#83. O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.
Phyllis McGinley
#84. I don't think about growing old," she said.
"I know you don't. That's one of the things I admire about you, Alice. You have some kind of boundless faith in the future. You never give up."
"I suppose I'm an optimist.
Richard Yates
#85. The pessimist says opportunities are NO WHERE. The optimist says opportunities are NOW HERE. Both see the same words, but read it differently. That's Life!-RVM
R.v.m.
#86. I say looking on the bright side of life never killed anybody.
Jenny Han
#87. I'm sort of a pessimist about tomorrow and an optimist about the day after tomorrow.
Eric Sevareid
#88. I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.
Hans Rosling
#89. I was tired of working in the lumber industry," Phil said. "I was sure I could find a better job, and look at me now - cook on a dilapidated submarine. Life keeps on getting better and better." "You always were an optimist," Klaus said.
Lemony Snicket
#90. I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad.
Matt Mullenweg
#91. Circumstances would always exist in the human's success story, but it is not controlled by destiny. Destiny is controlled by "FATE." I think it might be the optimist in me, but in America, "Dreams" are livable.
Henry Johnson Jr
#92. An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.
Oscar Wilde
#93. It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
G.K. Chesterton
#94. Nothing that's ever happened has taken away the optimist in me. It's always, "Whatever-let's go to Disneyland." Yes, I have my bleak, tortured-artist moments, but you have to hold on to what's positive.
Mariah Carey
#95. Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea.
Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink.
Is the glass part full or part empty?
Take another sip.
And now?
Vera Nazarian
#96. I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.
Bill Ayers
#97. I am and always will be the optimist, the hoper of far-flung hopes and the dreamer of improblable dreams.
Matt Smith
#98. With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.
Studs Terkel
#99. Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.
Brian Eno
#100. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget but a pessimist forgets to laugh.
Tom Bodett
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
