Optimism Quotes

In my ninety-plus years, I have learned a secret. I have learned that when good men and good women face challenges with optimism, things will always work out! Truly, things always work out! Despite how difficult circumstances may look at the moment, those who have faith and move forward with a happy spirit will find that things always work out.

~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.

~ Augusten Burroughs

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience.What's pessimism? I said.Religion without God.

~ Jonathan Kellerman

Optimism: That effervescent, blindingly- bright, perky, chipper, twittering quality you want to squash out of annoying people.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

~ Barack Obama

The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.

~ Roméo Dallaire

They've been stepping on my toes for years. It's just a reason to get new boots.

~ Steven Tyler

Live with the assumption that every day it will rain. If it does, you were right. If it doesn’t, you were fortunate.

~ Zack W. Van

Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.

~ Emma Forrest

Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.

~ George Eliot

I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you'd let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be.

~ Roméo Dallaire

If we define optimism broadly as the tendency to maintain a positive outlook, then realistic optimism is the tendency to maintain a positive outlook within the constraints of the available measurable phenomena situated in the physical and social world (DeGrandpre, 2000, p. 733). With respect to fuzzy meaning, realistic optimism involves enhancing and focusing on the favorable aspects of our experiences. Examples include being lenient in our evaluation of past events, actively appreciating the positive aspects of our current situation, and routinely emphasizing possible opportunities for the future. With respect to fuzzy knowledge, realistic optimism involves hoping, aspiring, and searching for positive experiences while acknowledging what we do not know and accepting what we cannot know.

~ Sandra L. Schneider

What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn't even notice how she has to keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn't like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses.

~ Rick Moody

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

~ Shalom Auslander

In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

~ Albert Camus

One cloud is enough to eclipse all the sun.

~ Thomas Fuller

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

~ Voltaire

When I look in the glass I see that every line in my face means pessimism but in spite of my face - that is my experience - I remain an optimist.

~ Richard Jeffries

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.

~ Don Marquis

An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed.

~ Kin Hubbard

Pessimist - one who when he has the choice of two evils chooses both.

~ Oscar Wilde

My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

~ Jean Rostand

A pessimist is one who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

~ Elbert Hubbard

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.

~ Elbert Hubbard

When it is dark enough you can see the stars.

~ Charles A. Beard

There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle.

~ Robert Alden

When things come to the worst they generally mend.

~ Susanna Moodie

The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.

~ James Branch Cabell

Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate.

~ J. R. R. Tolkien

The world gets better every day - then worse again in the evening.

~ Kin Hubbard

A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays And confident tomorrows.

~ William Wordsworth

There is a budding morrow in midnight.

~ John Keats

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

~ Václav Havel

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

I do believe that most men live lives of quiet desperation. For despair, optimism is the only practical solution. Hope is practical. Because eliminate that and it's pretty scary. Hope at least gives you the option of living.

~ Harry Nilsson

Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.

~ Jane Mcgonigal

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

~ Stephen Ambrose

Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.

~ Elbert Hubbard