Pessimism Quotes
-
To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.
Brando Skyhorse
-
May I make two citations from the words of a discerning editorial writer, not one of my faith, but one of much faith: "If we neglect the divine . . . and give ourselves over wholly to the human," he said, "we may certainly count upon nothing but the triumph of pessimism. . . . True optimism must rest upon a calm, unshakable faith in eternal life and in the unlimited goodness of him who gives it."
Richard L. Evans
-
Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
Norman Cousins
-
Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
David Landes
-
Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure.
Bill Clinton
-
Pessimism is carefully cultivated in some intellectual circles, as if it were a precious plant that the human race could not afford to lose.
Arthur Lynch
-
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
-
The world we live in is a world of mingled good and evil. Whether it is chiefly good or chiefly bad depends on how we take it. To look at the world in such a way as to emphasize the evil is the art of pessimism. To look at it in such a way as to bring out the good, and throw the evil into the background, is the art of optimism. The facts are the same in either case. It is simply a question of perspective and emphasis.
William DeWitt Hyde
-
When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, have you grown old.
Samuel Ullman
-
I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.
Wole Soyinka
-
I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
Terence McKenna
-
I feel that there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into fantasy and there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into pessimism, but that, in fact, the novel as it has developed should, if it's functioning correctly, have equipped you as the reader to make your own decision about where you want to go with that, about where you're going to fall on that continuum. So, the novel is taking you directly up to the point that you have to choose, and it's letting you do that.
Emily Barton
-
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimistic or pessimistic, but it is our optimism or pessimism of physiological or pathological origin that makes our ideas.
Miguel de Unamuno