Optimism famous quotes
06-15-2025
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I was also built from delusional optimism and folly.
-- A.S. King -
My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.
-- Abdul Kalam -
I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.
-- Abigail Reynolds -
False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment , anger and hopelessness.
-- Abraham Maslow -
There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
-- Agnes Repplier -
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
-- Alain de Botton -
Optimism may sometimes be delusional, but pessimism is always delusional.
-- Alan Cohen -
History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.
-- Alan Greenspan -
Optimism is inevitably the last hope of the defeated
-- Albert Meltzer -
An inspired and inspiring guide to living with optimism in a world that is increasingly jaded and pessimistic. Uplifting, rousing, and challenging us to dream the world into being in a positive and creative manner.
-- Alberto Villoldo -
Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.
-- Alex Steffen -
I was born optimistic...I was laughing from the beginning of my life.
-- Alice Herz-Sommer -
Optimism is the last resort of those in deep despair. There can't be any optimists in heaven.
-- Alice Thomas Ellis -
Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
-- Andre Gide -
In Jones's experience, the decision to turn one's life around in a different direction rarely arrived with fireworks and marching bands. Often, the decision came with tears and regret. Then, almost impossibly, the power of forgiveness would fill an unseen void, allowing a new day's optimism and sense of purpose to take hold and point that life in a new direction.
-- Andy Andrews -
I’m always about optimism and exuberance. It’s what I feel about fashion.
-- Anna Sui -
... She knew in her heart that to be without optimism, that core of reasonless hope in the spirit rather than the brain, was a fatal flaw, the seed of death.
-- Anne Perry -
It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.
-- Anne Rice -
Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.
-- Anthony Daniels -
Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.
-- Antonio Gramsci -
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
-- Arnold Bennett -
How vain are our fears! I thought to myself. Sometimes we fear that which our opponent (or fate) had never even considered! After this, then, is it any longer worthwhile to rack one's brain to find new ghosts to fear? No, indeed: All hail optimism! - upon playing Hermanis Mattison after he overlooked an unusual knight manouevre.
-- Aron Nimzowitsch -
The future seems a little gloomy! Go to bed early, sleep well, eat moderately at breakfast; the future looks brighter. The world's outlook may not have changed, but our capacity for dealing with it has. Happiness, or unhappiness, depends to some extent on external conditions, but also, and in most cases chiefly, on our own physical and mental powers. Some people would be discontented in Paradise, others ... are cheerful in a graveyard.
-- Arthur Lynch -
Some people would be discontented in Paradise, others ... are cheerful in a graveyard.
-- Arthur Lynch -
If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.
-- Aung San Suu Kyi -
It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. ... Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich -
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
-- Barbara Johnson -
While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
-- Benjamin Graham -
Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.
-- Bernard Beckett -
Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. We can always replace negative with positive.
-- Betty Eadie -
Many people would rather be certain of their worries and fears, than risk the uncertainty of hope and optimism.
-- Bill Crawford -
Realistic optimism allows us to experience the best until we have to deal with the worst ... which often, never comes.
-- Bill Crawford -
Optimism, unaccompanied by personal effort, is merely a state of mind and not fruitful.
-- Bill Vaughan -
The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.
-- Billy Connolly -
What I've really learned over time is that optimism is a very, very important part of leadership.
-- Bob Iger -
Positive wish: 'The sun will come out tomorrow.' Negative reality: 'Yeah, and it will flash brand-new daylight on the same old mess unless something is done to clean it up.
-- Bobby Knight -
The biggest emotion in creation is the bridge to optimism.
-- Brian May -
Optimism is the one quality more associated with success and happiness than any other.
-- Brian Tracy -
In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.
-- Brooks Atkinson -
Consider, if you will, the morning boner. What a metaphor of hope and renewal! How can anyone give way to despair when one’s groin greets each day with such a gala spectacle of physical optimism?
-- C.D. Payne -
Through training, practice, and a deep sense of optimism, architects see opportunities where others only see a void. This has been the driving principle behind Architecture for Humanity since our founding.
-- Cameron Sinclair -
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
-- Carl Sandburg -
I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.
-- Carlos Fuentes -
Firm and patient optimism always yields its rewards.
-- Carlos Slim -
Construction is a matter of optimism; its a matter of facing the future with confidence.
-- Cesar Pelli -
Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.
-- Charles A. Reich -
Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.
-- Charles Caleb Colton -
You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down
-- Charlie Chaplin -
Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.
-- Charlie Crist -
Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.
-- Charlie Pierce -
My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I'm luckier than other mortals, and they sure don't come from visualizing victory. They're the result of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it. Like most astronauts, I'm pretty sure that I can deal with what life throws at me because I've thought about what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. That's the power of negative thinking.
-- Chris Hadfield -
It ain't as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
-- Colin Powell -
I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.
-- Colum McCann -
Sorrow, anger and resentment look back, worry looks around, while faith, hope, and optimism look to the future.
-- Dan Miller -
If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well this isn't too bad, I don't have a left arm anymore but at least nobody will ever ask me if I'm left-handed or right-handed," but most of us would say something more along the lines of, "Aaaaaa! My arm! My arm!
-- Daniel Handler -
One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.
-- Daniel Kahneman -
Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.
-- Daniel Kahneman -
I think Americans expect optimism in their leadership. The most popular and effective leaders, whether it was Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy, brought to it a sense of optimism and possibility.
-- David Brooks -
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.
-- David Deutsch -
In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when they are wrong they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eye-open optimism pays.
-- David Landes -
Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
-- David Landes -
Obama ran on a platform of unmitigated optimism - a promise to usher in a brighter day for America. But there could hardly be a greater contrast between his pledge and his performance in office, between his commitment to the nation and his current abandonment of all hope.
-- David Limbaugh -
Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency.
-- David Myers -
Like pride, blind optimism may go before a fall.
-- David Myers -
True optimism is not the prospect of control over pain or elimination of it but survival through it.
-- David Richo -
Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation. (161)
-- David Wroblewski -
A lot of people over time have had this kind of pattern in their relationship with Bill Clinton. You first meet him and you're overwhelmed by his talent. He's so energetic and articulate and full of ideas and he calls himself a congenital optimist and that optimism is contagious.
-- Dee Dee Myers -
Optimism boosts your energy and focuses your sights on reaching your goals, rather than wallowing in your setbacks.
-- Denis Waitley -
That is why, with optimism instead of fear, all those who want to see Puerto Rico's status resolved should seek the truth about each option, including the upside and the downside of each.
-- Dick Thornburgh -
If you believe that you are bad and unacceptable, you are unable to look back at your past with pleasure or your future with hope. Only bad things happened to you in the past, and only bad things will happen to you in the future.
-- Dorothy Rowe -
I could never be cynical, not that I think there's anything wrong with cynicism. I think it can be quite funny at times. But I just feel so grateful to be alive.
-- Drew Barrymore -
Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility.
-- E. J. Dionne -
Does not a misplaced optimism exist, common to all mankind, leading on to false conviction that social engagements, if dated sufficiently far ahead, will never really materialize?
-- E. M. Delafield -
Optimism is the cheerful frame of mind that enables a teakettle to sing, though in hot water up to its nose.
-- Earl Weaver -
Congratulations to Barack Obama - great victory based on building fairer economy and optimism about what politics can achieve.
-- Ed Miliband -
You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that? Come up with a smiling face, It's nothing against you to fall down flat But to lie there - that's a disgrace.
-- Edmund Vance Cooke -
The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.
-- Edward Albee -
To look forward and not back, To look out and not in, and To lend a hand.
-- Edward Everett Hale -
There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, and that is man himself. If we hadn't had such a magnificent optimism to carry us through all these things, we wouldn't be here. We have survived it on our optimism.
-- Edward Steichen -
Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.
-- Elbert Hubbard -
Every life is its own excuse for being, and to deny or refute the untrue things that are said of you is an error in judgment. All wrong recoils upon the doer, and the person who makes wrong statements about others is themselves to be pitied, not the person they vilify. It is better to be lied about than to lie. At the last no one can harm us but ourselves.
-- Elbert Hubbard -
To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment.
-- Eleanor Perenyi -
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
-- Ellen Willis -
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 -
I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint.
-- Elsie de Wolfe -
I believe in optimism & plenty of white paint.
-- Elsie de Wolfe -
Pessimism comes from the temperament, optimism from the will.
-- Emile Chartier -
There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
-- Euripides -
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.
-- F. H. Bradley -
I feel the matter of my heart being transformed, metallized, in an optimism of steel.
-- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti -
Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.
-- Francis Bacon -
David Cameron's message of change, optimism and hope is in tune with what Britain wants today
-- Francis Maude -
If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?
-- Francis Parker Yockey -
Seedsmen reckon that their stock in trade is not seeds at all ... it's optimism.
-- Geoff Hamilton
