Famous Quotes & Sayings

Salman Rushdie

optimism is a disease

Robert Louis Stevenson

We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.

Sarah Dessen

He'd always had that fearless optimism that made cynics like me squirm. I wondered if it was enough for both of us. I would never know from here, though. And time was passing. Crucial minutes and seconds, each one capable of changing everything.

William Arthur Ward

Optimism is a seed sown in the soil of faith; pessimism is a seed hoarded in the vault of doubt.

Samuel Johnson

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

Joseph Addison

I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.

Rachel Caine

but sometimes optimism is the only drug that works. But it’s sadly temporary in its effects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

Lewis Mumford

I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.

Walker Percy

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.

Milan Kundera

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Octavio Paz

Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.

Oprah Winfrey

You are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything.

Freya Stark

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

Alan Shearer

There was a big possibility that I would have had to leave Newcastle had Ruud Gullit stayed as manager.

Claire Messud

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

Amy Poehler

Forgiveness is something that's always possibility.

Ann Brashares

When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.

Joni Eareckson Tada

Americans are nervous; Americans are restless; and what troubles me the most is that Americans are uncharacteristically pessimistic.

Nate Silver

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

Mark Twain

A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.

Mark Twain

Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive.

Eugene Ionesco

Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.

Bill Vaughan

There is not a single pessimistic note anywhere in the New Testament after the resurrection.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation.

David Eddings

If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own.

Colin Mochrie

I am such a pessimist that every project has surpassed what I envisioned.