Optimists Quotes

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism. ~ John Derbyshire

Optimism is the last resort of those in deep despair. There can't be any optimists in heaven. ~ Alice Thomas Ellis

Communists are the last optimists. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Ella turned to the fireplace where a blackened kettle hung over what Granny Weatherwax always called an optimist's fire: two logs and hope. ~ Terry Pratchett

Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. ~ Shimon Peres

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands. ~ Ariel Gore

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I'm a lawyer. Pessimists see a glass half-empty; optimists see a glass half-full. Lawyers see a glass containing possible carcinogenic materials without a warning label. Skepticism is coded in our DNA. ~ Naima Simone

Optimists envision the best that could happen.
Pessimists envision the worst that could happen.
Pragmatists envision the likely to happen.
The pessimist finds many reasons to quit.
The optimist finds many reasons to keep going. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

We are not optimists because we can predict a bright and beautiful future, but we're not pessimists either, because the future is unknown and unknowable. We are, rather, active participants in possibility, willing workers in the fields of what could be, but is not yet. We are compelled by love- love of children and youth, love of a world in need of repair- and powered by hope. ~ William Ayers

Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists ~ Mark Twain

Fighters have to be optimists. ~ Greg Jackson

The world belongs to optimists; the pessimists are only spectators. ~ Francois Guizot

Reciprocal illusions: the pessimist's fear and the optimist's hope. ~ Marty Rubin

Optimists are intrinsically happier and happiness breeds further happiness. Light a candle rather than curse the darkness and do not wait for someone else to light it; do it yourself. ~ Natasha Murtagh

Shivers heaved out a sigh. "Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I'm one of those ... you've got a word for it, don't you?"
"Idiots?"
He looked sideways at her. "It was a different one I had in mind."
"Optimists."
"That's the one. I'm an optimist."
"How's it working out for you?"
"Not great, but I keep hoping."
"That's optimists. You bastards never learn. ~ Joe Abercrombie

I like to think of my people as mute optimists - leave the elephant alone and, eventually, perhaps with the help of a couple mimosas, he will disappear from the room on his own accord. ~ Julie Buxbaum

Do I think it was inherent nobility that brought us out here?" He shook his head. "Maybe. I don't call it nobility, though. I think it's our innate human need to champion the underdog. We are constant optimists. We're the emotional descendents of the caveman who stood defiant in the front of the wooly mammoth. We rebuild cities at the base of Vesuvius, get back on the bicycle when we fall off, whack that hornet's nest every spring. Humans cheer for the couldn't be, believe in the shouldn't be. We love causes; the harder, the more lost they are, the more we love them. Is that nobility?Maybe. Maybe it's a pernicious genetic defect that makes our species susceptible to shared delusion. Whatever it is, it keeps life interesting. ~ Cassandra Davis

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them. ~ Ouida

There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you're right. ~ Marc Andreessen

Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present. ~ Rudy Giuliani

Being in touch with reality but focusing on the more positive angles is being a realistic optimist. Realistic optimists merely filter out unnecessary negative information. They learn to tune out negative words and occurrences and develop a habit of interpreting ambiguous situations in a more positive manner. ~ Iben Dissing Sandahl

Life belongs to optimists. Pessimists are just viewers. Making it real, starts with our attitude. ~ Cathy Burnham Martin

The dry high spirits of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists look damp and depressed. ~ Philip Littell

In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right. ~ Jack Nicholson

Pessimists thrive while optimists starve. ~ Zachariah Dracoulis

As a bull market turns into a bear market, the new pros turn into optimists, hoping and praying the bear market will become a bull and save them. But as the market remains bearish, the optimists become pessimists, quit the profession, and return to their day jobs. This is when the real professional investors re-enter the market. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In ~ Sebastian Faulks

Dogwoods are great optimists. Daffodils wait and see, crouching firmly underground just in case spring doesn't come this year, but dogwoods have faith. ~ Barbara Holland

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past, ~ Walter Cronkite

The world belongs to optimists. Pessimists are only spectators. ~ Francois Guizot

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley; ~ David Mitchell

It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them.

It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished.< ~ Michael Ignatieff

Pessimistic" is a word for "realistic" that optimists use to make themselves feel better (about their unrealisticness). ~ Claire

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. ~ John Keegan

Optimists move through life with a happy exterior. What happens on the inside shows up on the outside. ~ Marilyn Suttle

The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence - we, as a species, working together - to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we're working on that will change the world for the better. Which way of looking at the world is going to produce a Next Greatest Generation? Will it be the ones who give up, or the ones who get going? Making ~ Bill Nye

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known. ~ Alex Haley

The other option was to go to the public library. Few people came back from a visit to the library. There was one girl a few years ago the survived the summer reading program at the Night Vale Public Library. The girl, Tamika Flynn, defeated the librarian that had imprisoned her and her classmates using the switchblade hidden in every hardback edition of Eudora Welty's touching homecoming novel, The Optimist's Daughter. But few who have seen a librarian up close have survived or been in a physical condition to communicate. ~ Joseph Fink

But if you've got a cheerful, friendly demeanor, people act like you don't know better, like you've never heard of poverty or a broken bone. Optimists never get credit for the effort it takes to keep believing things are going to be okay. Here's a secret: most optimists know the world is full of horrors. They just think it can be improved. ~ Josh Gondelman

Optimists think badly, but live well. ~ Marty Rubin

Then there are the optimists. The story continues, but it stays the same. The princess lives happily ever after with her prince, probably pops out a few kids and carries on the bloodline. Marriages survive, families continue, and good prevails over evil. These are the people who cannot bear deviations from the rule. Everything fits into neat little boxes. When bad things happen, they ignore it, or use some quote about everything happening for a reason, or what doesn't kill us make us stronger. They carry on without even talking about their bad experiences, pretending everything is all right. ~ Sarah Dalton

Cynic' is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists. ~ Gregory Benford

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

There is a lot to be mad about in America today, but we must never forget that our cause is a joyous one. Conservatives should be optimists who believe in people. We champion hope and opportunity. Fighting for people, helping those who need us, and saving the country - this is, and should be, happy work. ~ Arthur C. Brooks

I shall not assess arguments and evidence for competing views about when human extinction will occur. We know it will occur, and this fact has a curious effect on my argument. In a strange way it makes my argument an optimistic one. Although things are now not the way they should be - there are people when there should be none - things will someday be the way they should be - there will be no people. In other words, although things are now bad, they will be better, even if they first get worse with the creation of new people. Some may wish to be spared this kind of optimism, but some optimists may take a measure of comfort in this observation. ~ David Benatar

I found my way to street level and into what optimists call 'fresh air ~ Gunnar Staalesen

Optimists are right. So are pessimists. It's up to you to choose which you will be. ~ Harvey MacKay

As Americans, we have traditionally been the optimists sporting the 'can-do' attitude. But when it comes to addressing climate adaptation and resiliency, we seem to be more 'can't do' than 'can-do.' ~ Paul Tonko

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing
its goodness. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are optimists, until we are not. ~ Charles Darwin

Eating at a new, highly recommended restaurant is like a Very Important Blind Date, a contract with uncertainty you enter into with great expectation battling the cynicism of experience. You sit waiting, wondering about the upcoming moments of revelation. Somewhere in the back of your head is the dour warning that disappointment is inevitable but you don't really believe it or you wouldn't be there. The best eaters are always optimists. ~ Stuart Stevens

Pessimists beat their heads against walls, while optimists open doors. ~ Wes Fesler

There are different types of people in the world. There are people who accept what's in front of them unquestioningly. The live in the dark. In defeat. Ignoring what the future might bring or how they might help to make things happen. Then there are people like me. Optimists. They too live in the dark, in times like these, but dream of the light. I trust in the possibilities of betterness. I believe there is more to life than this. I have to. There's no other choices for me. ~ Jeyn Roberts

Optimists are usually inexperienced. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter - the optimist's holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life. ~ Richard Ford

Personally, I don't like inherently happy people. I don't trust them. I think there's something seriously wrong with anyone who isn't at least a little let down by the world. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

The bottom line on attitude is that a good one helps to increase your possibilities. Pessimists usually get what they expect. So do optimists. ~ John C. Maxwell

Optimists are the least prepared for the loss of hope. ~ James Marcus

Like all shopkeepers, they are deep-down optimists. They have to be, because every morning they unlock the doors to their stores, turn on the lights, prepare for the day, and wait for people to walk in and hand them money. ~ Robert Spector

Optimists focus on the place they are going. Pessimists focus on the obstacles along the route. To become an optimist simply look ahead. ~ Simon Sinek

If there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better. ~ Jose Saramago

Pessimists calculate the odds. Optimists believe they can overcome them. ~ Ted Koppel

Pessimists see problems as stemming from stable and universal causes, thus making them less susceptible to corrective action. Optimists, in contrast, view problems as temporary and resulting from specific factors that will either change or be changed. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

To satisfy both optimists and pessimists, we may conclude by saying that we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other. History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly. ~ Ambrose Bierce

But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them. ~ Fredrik Backman

But America was built by optimists. Optimists like my friend Amanda, who recently started a small business. When she went to buy her website address-her first and last name-she found that someone already owned it, but wasn't using it. So my friend emailed the owner of the site to ask if she could buy it. The owner wrote back. ~ Eva Longoria

I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am. ~ Christopher Nolan

We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with. We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do, on the side of justice, for the poor. - HERBERT MCCABE, OP ~ Terry Eagleton

Let optimists rule the world. ~ Lauryn Hill

Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists. ~ Franz Grillparzer

Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists ~ Roger Ebert

We're all optimists in our profession or we'd be forced to shoot ourselves. - Joshua Bloch ~ Peter Seibel

Stealing things is everybody's problem. We [Apple Inc.] own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there's just no legal alternative. ~ Steve Jobs

Cynical' is a term invented by optimists to describe realists. ~ Anonymous

There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch

We can be a lot smarter and more capable than a lot of the technology doubters and climate deniers assume. The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence - we, as a species, working together - to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we're working on that will change the world for the better. Which way of looking at the world is going to produce a Next Greatest Generation? Will it be the ones who give up, or the ones who get going? ~ Bill Nye

History has a cruel way of disappointing optimists. ~ Keith Thompson

In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when they are wrong they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eye-open optimism pays. ~ David Landes

If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two. ~ Julian Baggini

Optimists - people who believe in Britain, who believe in democracy - they're the people I believe who will vote for us to leave and take back control. ~ Michael Gove

Humans are a special breed with the rare ability to find laughter in darkness, horror in the light, hope amidst turmoil, and fear in times of peace. We are the contrarians, the restless ones, the pessimistic optimists, those who surprise ourselves with our own bravery when really we should expect it from each other. Our standards are so low and high at the same time that we manage to feel satisfied and dissatisfied in the same breath. And that, I realize, is what makes us worth saving. We may be far from perfect - and by far I mean the distance from one galaxy to the next - but that's what makes life interesting. The good is only good because of the bad, and happiness all the sweeter because of the pain. We are brave; we are strong; we are despicable; we are scum; we are kind; we are mean;
We are human. ~ David Estes

We find that the optimists have an undeniable advantage over the pessimists. Many studies show that they do better on exams, in their chosen profession, and in their relationships, live longer and in better health, enjoy a better chance of surviving postoperative shock, and are less prone to depression and suicide. ~ Matthieu Ricard

Definitely not - you optimists just can't understand that a depressed person doesn't want you to try and cheer them up. It makes us sick. ~ Brandon Sanderson

A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air. ~ Walter Winchell

Some people would say comedy draws from some dark places, from your dark stuff. Life's great optimists aren't necessarily the funniest people. ~ Colin Firth

Children are born optimists and we slowly educate them out of their heresy ~ Louise Imogen Guiney

As discomfiting as it is to both market optimists and policy activists, a certain amount of instability is inherent to the economy. ~ Virginia Postrel

There would be a lot more optimists if it weren't for the rise-and-shine requierement. ~ Robert Breault

Christians should not be optimists; we know too much about sin. We should also not be pessimists, for we know the living God. ~ Timothy Keller

Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they're more likely to pick themselves up and try again. ~ Paul Tough

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Pessimists try to convince you the world sucks, optimists already know it does and smile anyway. ~ Jonathan Harnisch

But black folks have never really been optimists. We've been prisoners of hope, and hope is qualitatively different from optimism in the way that there's a difference between The Blues and Lawrence Welk. The Blues and Jazz have to do with hope while the other is sugarcoated music which has to do with sentimental optimism. ~ Cornel West

Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce. ~ Zig Ziglar

I am almost certain fishermen posess a peculiar bend to their makeup. Fisherman are optimists, and the fish in the future is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient. Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it lands on the water are rare. ~ Joseph Monninger

Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists. ~ Peter H. Diamandis