Top 100 The Pessimist Quotes
#1. Vision involves optimism and hope. The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.
J. Oswald Sanders
#2. The optimist pleasantly ponders how high his kite will fly; the pessimist woefully wonders how soon his kite will fall.
William Arthur Ward
#3. 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
#4. The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.
Emil M. Cioran
#5. Briefly, then, life, to the pessimist, is a motiveless desire, a constant pain and continued struggle, followed by death, and so on, in secula seculorum, until the planet's crust crumbles to dust.
Edgar Saltus
#6. The pessimist focuses on the storm;
the optimist looks forward to the rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#7. An optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.
Ada Leverson
#8. Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. But it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.
Charles Williams
#11. 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
#12. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
#13. The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced.
Agnes Repplier
#14. The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#15. The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.
Thomas Ligotti
#16. The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be surprised at it.
G.K. Chesterton
#17. When hearing a door creak, the optimist thinks it's opening and the pessimist thinks it's closing.
Matthieu Ricard
#18. The optimist sees the doughnut but the pessimist see 452 calories and a shed load of sugar ...
James Minter
#19. 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
#20. To the optimist all doors have handles and hinges; to the pessimist, all doors have locks and latches.
William Arthur Ward
#21. Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
Martin Seligman
#22. In the long run, the pessimist may be proven right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.
Daniel Reardon
#23. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward
#24. Reciprocal illusions: the pessimist's fear and the optimist's hope.
Marty Rubin
#25. Winston Churchill once quipped, "The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." He went on to say, "I am an optimist. It does not seem much use being anything else.
William Ury
#26. The optimist and the pessimist both die in the end, but each lives is life in a completely different way.
Paulo Coelho
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
Rene Descartes
#31. Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!
Oscar Wilde
#32. You can discern the pessimist from the optimist by just looking at how people react to snow.
Iveta Cherneva
#33. The pessimist looks down and hits his head. The optimist looks up and loses his footing. The realist looks forward and adjusts his path accordingly.
Robert Kirkman
#34. The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.
Randall Munroe
#35. The optimist says, "The glass is half full."
The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty."
The rationalist says, "This glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
That makes it clear as glass.
Thomas Cathcart
#36. The pessimist's nostalgia, deteriorism goes far beyond simply whining that things used to be better and takes the bold stance that the world is actively and energetically going to hell in a handbasket. also
Ammon Shea
#37. The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.
Kahlil Gibran
#38. 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
#39. The pessimist is the man who believes things couldn't possibly be worse, to which the optimist replies: 'Oh yes they could!'
Vladimir Bukovsky
#40. A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#41. The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#42. Optimists envision the best that could happen.
Pessimists envision the worst that could happen.
Pragmatists envision the likely to happen.
The pessimist finds many reasons to quit.
The optimist finds many reasons to keep going.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#43. When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
G.K. Chesterton
#44. 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
#45. The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
Oscar Wilde
#46. 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.
#47. The pessimist says, 'It can't get any worse!' And the optimist replies, 'Oh yes it can!
Madeleine Urban
#48. The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When
Martin E.P. Seligman
#49. The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. Point of view is the determining factor in the life of each.
Ralph Waldo Trine
#50. Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men ... under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
Agnes Repplier
#51. 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
#52. The pessimist! Whenever something good came along, he knew how to make the worst of it.
Marty Rubin
#53. An optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
Robert Anton Wilson
#54. To the pessimist the light at the end of the tunnel is another train.
Joan Rivers
#55. The optimist lives on the peninsula of infinite possibilities; the pessimist is stranded on the island of perpetual indecision.
William Arthur Ward
#56. The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.
Winston S. Churchill
#57. 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
#58. I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.
Christopher Nolan
#59. A pessimist asked God for relief. Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness, said God. No, replied the petitioner, I wish you to create something that would justify them. The world is all created,said God, but you have overlooked something
Ambrose Bierce
#60. I have always had a passion for the beautiful. If the man in me is often a pessimist, the artist, on the contrary, is pre-eminently an optimist.
Jules Breton
#61. That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.
James Jones
#62. A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
Oscar Wilde
#63. 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
#64. I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A.E. Housman
#65. Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Woody Allen
#66. A pessimist is a person who is always right but doesn't get any enjoyment out of it, while an optimist, is one who imagines that the future is uncertain. It is a duty to be an optimist, because if you imagine that the future is uncertain, then you mu
Victor Cherbuliez
#67. A pessimist sees the darkness around the light, but an optimist looks for the light in the darkness.
Debasish Mridha
#68. I can't seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.
John Corey Whaley
#69. When opportunity knocks a pessimist dials 911;
when opportunity knocks an optimist sets the table.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#70. Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.
Colin Wilson
#71. The believer is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. To be either is illusory. The believer sees reality not in a certain light but as it is, and believes only in God and God's power towards all and over all that is seen. (in No Rusty Swords)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#72. 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
#73. We did it!" I said, feeling limp with relief. "It actually worked!"
Dr. Turgenev rubbed his forehead. "I had very big doubts."
"Big doubts?" I said weakly.
The Russian scientist shrugged. "I am pessimist," he said.
Kenneth Oppel
#74. Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Oscar Wilde
#75. I've turned over a new leaf. On TV, Kenny Wallace said I was a pessimist after Charlotte, so I got mad. Now I am so excited about coming back that I just can't stand it. I wish we were starting tomorrow and I'm going to win! That's the new me.
Mark Martin
#76. 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
#77. Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive.
Mark Twain
#78. He who thinks all mankind is vile is a pessimist who mistakes his introspection for observation; he looks into his own heart and thinks he sees the world.
William George Jordan
#79. An optimist sees the miracles and beauty of life and a pessimist sees the sufferings and wonders, where is the life?
Debasish Mridha
#80. The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.
Mark Twain
#81. 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
#83. On one hand, I'm an optimistic pessimist. On the other, I'm a pessimistic optimist. But while there's life, there's still hope, and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't think there was still hope.
Helen Caldicott
#84. A pessimist doesn't see the sunset outside, he sees the dirt on the window.
Jim Rohn
#85. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
Lesslie Newbigin
#86. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos
Michael Lewis
#87. It is not at all polite to point out a crusty old pessimist's dark inner secret.
Brandon Sanderson
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Rut, routine, robotic. These are the three R's of adult-hood. Wake up, eat, go to work, eat, work more, come home, eat, sleep, and repeat every day until we all reach retirement, or death.
Craig R. Key
#92. A pessimist is someone who has forgotten the joy of beginning.
Marty Rubin
#93. 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
#94. The world belongs to optimists; the pessimists are only spectators.
Francois Guizot
#95. I'm a pessimist by nature, so it's always the worst things that come to mind first whenever you make a decision or have a decision to make.
Domhnall Gleeson
#96. I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way.
Nick Cave
#97. An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old one leaves.
Bill Vaughan
#98. I think there's a lot of hope in my work. I don't think I'm a total pessimist, so I think you can find hope in all my films. Some more than others, but there's definitely ... I think we want to convey the feeling of hope with the montage at the end.
Spike Lee
#99. Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but I'm having trouble finding any good news in the trashing of Harriet Miers.
Ellen Goodman
#100. I happen to be a pessimist, and maybe that's a good thing because I don't stop to smell the roses - which is not a good personal thing. I don't stop and enjoy those moments ... Always on to the next and never in the moment.
Nicki Minaj
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