Pessimism Quotes

It is our non negotiable responsibility to always stay positive, no matter what! The only thing that can make you negative is the thing you allow to make you negative! Think well and stay positive!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Some people see the liquid and thing half full. Others only see the air and think half empty. Sometimes I get the sense Chatham sees it all, which is kind of terrifying. I don't know if I want him to see me--the real me.

~ Mccall Hoyle

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

~ James Baldwin

We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she'd the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn't have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world.

~ Paul Auster

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

The Admiral so regrets failure, he cannot THINK of success.

~ John Taliaferro

To a great extent in spiritual things we get what we expect of the Lord. Faith alone can bring us to see Jesus.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

One physician may gravely exaggerate an illness and give up hope altogether. Another may ignorantly declare that there is no illness and that no treatment is necessary, thus deceiving the patient with false consolation. You may call the first one pessimistic and the second one optimistic. Both are equally dangerous.

~ Walpola Rahula

We’re programmed to imagine bad things happening to us, as opposed to good things, even if the good are more likely. It’s kind of a protective pessimism: if we worry about the worst happening, it may miss our door.

~ Ruth Dugdall

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.

~ Malcolm Gladwell

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

~ Philip Pullman

Don't let the disappointments of today kill tomorrow's blessings, destroy the negative flashes of pessimism, and focus on the mirror of optimism.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimist.

~ Don Marquis

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

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

~ Roberto Rossellini

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

~ Marcel Proust

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

~ Rachel Kushner

There are two words that I believe could be completely eradicated from our vocabulary – “I can’t.” These two words are so definite that they leave absolutely no room for hope. Instead, I suggest we use the phrase, “How can I?

~ Daniel Willey

(Billy) Graham went through passages of hypochondria and his closest friends had to assure him that he was not about to die.

~ Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty. I am gonna drink it through this crazy straw.

~ Joey Comeau

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

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

If you want to protect your pride, you don't need people to like you!

~ Wataru Watari

I'm all groan up in America.

~ Brian Spellman

You can't ever really have enough worth that when you're gone, the spot you left won't close over.

~ Laura Florand

This is Long Island, land of the rushed, home of the stressed.

~ Will Bly

My life is so bad that it's worse than it really is.

~ Brian Spellman

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.

~ Thomas Ligotti

When it rains it pours and when it shines you get melanoma.

~ Sol Luckman

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

~ Harold Bloom

If you are rude, cynical, habitually-sarcastic or pessimistic, your life options are going to be very limited.

~ Bryant Mcgill

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

~ William Faulkner

One of the easiest things in life is to judge others. One of the simplest things we can ever do is to tell how wrong people are. One of the most thoughtless things we can ever do is to show people their faults unconstructively. It is always so easy and common to do such things but, before you do that, find the uncommon reasons for the faulty life.Yes! before you do that, identify how to correct a faulty life and before you do that, think of what drives and invokes the joy, slothfulness or the melancholy in people. Until you go through what people have been through, until you experience what has become a part of people, until you understand what drives the real interest of people and until you become fully aware of the real vision, aspirations, desires and the needs of others, ponder before you criticize!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

~ Victor Hugo

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.

~ George F. Will

– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

~ Peter Wessel Zapffe