Pessimism Quotes

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.

~ Jack London

I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

School prepares you for the real world... which also bites.

~ Jim Benton

Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference.

~ David T. Dellinger

I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!

~ Charles Dickens

POZZO:I am blind.(Silence.)ESTRAGON:Perhaps he can see into the future.

~ Samuel Beckett

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

~ Antonio Gramsci

The optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist as half empty. What I see is water that can save someone's life.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.

~ Criss Jami

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

~ Howard Zinn

Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.

~ Peter David

The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weakness and my lack of resolution, at my refusal to see justice through in the name of the woman who had borne me.

~ Peter David

Keep your eyes and your mind open. Don’t be blinded by filters like fear, uncertainty, pessimism and negativity.

~ Carlos Wallace

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

~ Andrew Wilson

Christians sometimes make themselves into elephants afraid of mice. You have the Creator of the universe on your side; not to mention, you've been given eternal life. 'Whom or what shall you fear?' To be afraid of anything other than God himself is like an insult to God.

~ Criss Jami

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

~ Salman Rushdie

The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable.

~ Colin Feltham

There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Beware of those who are bored and not passionate about life, for they will bore you with reasons for not living.

~ Suzy Kassem

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

~ Thomas Ligotti

Why is it that all individuals today, at least all who are socially conscious, are in one way or another tortured by social guilt? Because whatever they do is fatally false, falsified by the pressure of an utterly false society. If you live solely for individual contacts and personal service, then you betray your obligation to the suffering millions with whom you have no contact. If you live for economic or social and political action to cure the sick world, then, either you will be entirely ineffective, or else you will gain power, and so be corrupted by power; and then you will contribute to the burden of the institutionalism and mechanized tyranny that is turning all men into robots. If you withdraw from the world to purge your soul of the world’s poison, seeking a lone salvation in religious discipline and contemplation, then again you betray your immediate obligation to your fellows, even if you innocently suppose you will discover truth invaluable to a future generation. No! As I see it, do what you will, you are damned, just because you are all of a piece with a damned world, a damned species.

~ Olaf Stapledon

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

~ Thomas L. Friedman

The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die.

~ Ted Dekker

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In the end, every startup is different. But in the beginning every startup is the same.

~ Richie Norton

When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.

~ Geraldine Brooks

You say I can't do it because you can't. Mohammed Ali

~ Davis Miller

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.

~ David Benioff

That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.

~ David Benioff

All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Given as much law as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, an the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour that one was born so soon.

~ H.g. Wells

Maybe I should stop while I'm aheadNay, I swim with sea-demons no sweet summer tuned radioover my sunless desertscapehow does it burn without the sun?

~ Moonshine Noire

You're the optimist all the way through, pretending to be a pessimist on the inside, because you can act like it hurts less if you say you knew all along it was going to go down like that.

~ Amy Jo Cousins

Don't you ever think that your mind can never harm you just because it is your mind! Your mind can really kill you. From dawn to the time you retire, your mind can be a very good friend to you and your mind can also be your worst friend. What goes into your mind each day becomes your friend so mind your mind!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence which exists of both friends and enemies. They in turn have their own friends and enemies with whom they interact. That is a given. But we, each of us, tend to put ourselves ahead of others because we believe that we are significant. We must attend to our own needs, desires, wants, and aspirations, because each of us is our own greatest priority. No one else cares for us as much as we do, no one else can exist in our skin. We think we're important. It is where our sense of self-worth comes up, where our egos reside, where we are. And we believe that each of our lives means something.

~ Peter David

Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.

~ Peter David

Lack of movement is a formidable force to overcome.

~ Peter David