Pessimism Quotes

If you expect the battle to be insurmountable, you've met the enemy.It's you.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment. I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

~ Rob Brezsny

Okay, even if we disagree on that point, we still need to keep living our lives, don't we?...

~ Susin Nielsen

Life has too many disappointments to make room for negativity.

~ Daniel Willey

You can do what you want. You can fly as far as you want, be as determined as you want, but sooner or later you have to ask yourself, or the person with you, ‘will there be everything we have hoped for?’ When you realise there’s so little hope left, it is like seeing an entire shadow all over the world.

~ Kyra Gregory

If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.

~ Albert Camus

If you were destined to be a poet, then you won't brainstorm for lines that rhymes. If you were destined to be a celebrity, then you shouldn't start searching for fans. If you are truly a god, then let others worship you!

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.

~ Edith Hamilton

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.

~ William Shakespeare

Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world.

~ Robertson Davies

Naturally all of us don't think we deserve very much. We don't believe that things will go well for us in the future, generally because they may not have in the past. Our natural bent is to expect the worst. Our natural tendency is to be negative and doubtful. It is actually very hard to be positive. It takes faith to be positive and believe that good things are in our future.

~ Lisa Bedrick

Doubt is a form of pessimism that acts as an agent, which is sent to hinder prosperity on its materilization journey.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Don't degrade your soul to the extent of believing in curses. No man can curse you except your maker.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.

~ Peter Cameron

Habitual excuses for inactivity indicates little or no interest in what one ought to have done.

~ Itohan Eghide

Human existence is a penal colony; a sexually transmitted disease; a disappointment; nothing but suffering; “a sky-dive: out of a cunt into the grave”; a one-way ticket to the crematorium. “Nobody gets out of here alive”. Every day is a grim passage, a struggle through moments and hours of loneliness, boredom, emptiness, and self-loathing. I count myself among the pessimists. I believe that life is suffering. I force myself (my contraself) to look at other positions, but this remains my default. More specifically, I am a depressive realist.

~ Colin Feltham

John Hay points to our our history of getting lost in suffering when, so close together were pain and antidote.

~ John Taliaferro

So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.

~ Herman Melville

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

When people run in circles it's a very very... mad world.

~ Tears For Fears

There's actually a sort of comfort in the belief that things can only get worse. It gives one an appreciation for the here-and-now, knowing that each and every moment may be as good as its ever going to get. Anyways, I can't imagine living too happy a life - so much to lose. It only figures that the more miserable your life is, the easier it is to lose it. And, when you can lose it at any moment, any time un-enjoyed must be time well spent. (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

~ Mort W. Lumsden

I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.

~ Haruki Murakami

Stain my eyes as I may, on all sides all is black.

~ Helen Hunt Jackson

Life is short unless agony is long.

~ Brian Spellman

If you only go around once in life, then why has that one gone around more than once?

~ Brian Spellman

Masturbation = Imagination + Activity. Worry = Imagination + Negativity.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

But it's like no matter how much energy you pour into getting to the station on time, or getting on the right train, there's still no guarantee that anybody's gonna be there for you to pick you up when you get there.

~ Nancy Oliver

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look around them.

~ Ouida

A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.

~ Cyrano De Bergerac

Someone who smiles too much with you can sometime frown too much with you at your back.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

No matter how valuable you are and your ideas, fools will certainly play both of you down, so exclude yourselves from the inflammatory environs of fools.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Mind your mind. Think of distinctive footprints. Insofar as all things move forward and not backward, avoid retrogressive thinking, imprison negative thoughts, build a strong wall against negativity , be optimistic enough to deduce the optimisms in pessimism and think ahead of time. Understand the time you have and know what to do with the time, for time can loose it essence with time. If you ignore the real reasons why you wake up each day, you ignore the real reason why you continue to live each day. Life is just once so take the chance and mind your mind

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Do this exercise: Demolish the bridges of pessimism behind you. If you do this very well, you'll have no other choice than to move forward! Successful people are always optimistic!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.

~ Charles Dickens

The spirit of pessimism inside of her was purely organic.

~ S.a. Tawks

Disappointment is really just a term for our refusal to look on the bright side.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The world has become jaded. Romance has died, some no longer believe in love, and because of this, they suffer.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Chasms are deceived by rumors of their depth.

~ Marty Rubin

If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary... • If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller