Pessimism Pessimistic Quotes

At any given moment, it is a beautiful day in many parts of the world. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Life is how you look at it. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Thankfulness is an attitude of possibilities, not an attitude of liabilities. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. ~ Gillian Flynn

I'm an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but i'm always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn't happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist. ~ Paul Auster

Life has too many disappointments to make room for negativity. ~ Daniel Willey

If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short. ~ Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

Every swamp has a silted lining. ~ Brian Spellman

Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart. ~ James Branch Cabell

Enigma, positive confusion (delirium), problematic, pain, whatever we want to call it; the torment of the philosophers in any case, is the stimulus to ecstatic creation, to an interminable "resolution" into the enhanced provocations of art. What the philosophers have never understood is this: it is the unintelligibility of the world alone that gives it worth. "Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character". Not, then, to oppose pain to the absence of pain as metaphysical pessimism does, but, rather, to differentiate the ecstatic overcoming of pain from weariness and inertia, to exult in new and more terrible agonies, fears, burning perplexities as the resource of becoming, overcoming, triumph, the great libidinal oscillations that break up stabilized systems and intoxicate on intensity; that is Dionysian pessimism -"refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic"; "the effect of the work of art is to excite the state that creates art -intoxication". ~ Nick Land

When all things go bad, do not think so badly about all things, instead think about the things that made all things went bad and change something! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down ~ Charlie Chaplin

She'd always perceived the world to be against her. Happiness was never to be trusted. And yet I thought vaguely, neither was sorrow. Didn't each come to season in the other? ~ Regina O'Melveny

I'm not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live. ~ Claude Chabrol

Be a balanced optimist. Nobody is suggesting that you become an oblivious Pollyanna, pretending that nothing bad can or ever will happen. Doing so can lead to poor decisions and invites people to take advantage of you. Instead, be a rational optimist who takes the good with the bad, in hopes of the good ultimately outweighing the bad, and with the understanding that being pessimistic about everything accomplishes nothing. Prepare for the worst but hope for the best - the former makes you sensible, and the latter makes you an optimist. ~ Dale Carnegie

Pessimism is the luxury of the powerful. ~ Fatema Mernissi

Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye - an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It's not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big. ~ Noah Hawley

On the plus side, life doesn't add up. ~ Brian Spellman

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

All live to die, and rise to fall. ~ Christopher Marlowe

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

To be a prophet it is sufficient to be a pessimist. ~ Elsa Triolet

Human life grows cheaper with every mewling, puking infant that is born. Any form of birth control, no matter how unjust or extreme, is preferable to that tyranny exercised so criminally now by those who, in their filth, stupidity, rut and obnoxious lust, blindly and selfishly birth endlessly forth their disgusting progeny in chaotic, cancerous growth, shoving and forcing the guilty in with the innocent in this already over-stuffed planetary rat-box of accelerating madness and asphyxiation. ~ E.E. Rehmus

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God. ~ Cyril Connolly

If you expect the worst, you'll never be disappointed. ~ Sarah Dessen

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. ~ Paul Hawken

I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing. ~ Steven Morrissey

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. ~ Brian Eno

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. ~ Joseph Addison

Complete happiness cannot possibly exist; for that the body is full of many sensations, and that the mind sympathizes with the body, and is troubled when that is troubled, and also that fortune prevents many things which we cherished in anticipation; so that for all these reasons, perfect happiness eludes our grasp. ~ Hegesias Of Cyrene

Lose the pessimism, Ms. Lane. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them. ~ Marcel Proust

I've always been pessimistic about China. I can't see China going on without economic or social issues. ~ Ronnie Chan

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. ~ Norbert Wiener

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. ~ Doris Lessing

Interviewer: Did you go through a phase of hopelessness, or…

Chomsky: Yeah, every evening.

Interviewer: I feel like I'm kind of stuck in one.

Chomsky: Every evening. I mean, look: if you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point?

Interviewer: You've just got to work at it.

Chomsky: Yeah, what's the point? First of all, those predictions don't mean anything - they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget the pessimism. ~ Noam Chomsky

They retained only the faintest recollection of what they had lost and had no desire to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They derided the mere possibility of this former felicity of theirs and termed it a day-dream. They could not even picture it to themselves in images and forms, but strange and wondrous to relate, having lost any credence in their former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so longed to be innocent and happy once more, all over again that, childlike, they fell down before this, their heart's desire, deified it, built temples, and began to worship their own idea, their own 'desire', and tearfully bowed before it in adoration, while at the same time utterly discounting its feasibility or the possibility of its realization. However, had it ever become possible for them to return to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone could have shown it to them again and asked if they wanted to return to it, they would certainly have refused. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent. ~ Abhijit V. Banerjee

The shot glass is half drunk. ~ Brian Spellman

The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other. ~ Martin E.P. Seligman

I guess it really had been brave . . . because it was so bugger-all stupid, and if there was one thing I'd come to realize, ti was that bravery and bugger-all stupidity went hand in hand. ~ Peter David

Are you responsibly optimistic? Pessimism and leadership do not mix. Leaders are positively visionary. ~ J. Oswald Sanders

Often the best parts of life were when you
weren't doing anything at all, just mulling it over,
chewing on it. I mean, say you figure that everything
is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless
because you are aware that it's senseless and your
awareness of senselessness almost gives it a sense.
You know what I mean? An optimistic pessimism. ~ Charles Bukowski

The low-hanging fruit is cynicism and pessimism, and it's there if you want it. You can reach out and you can grab it, you don't even have to make any effort. ~ Emilio Estevez

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

We're all free and equal to die like dogs ~ Peter Weiss

A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it. ~ Stephen M. Irwin

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself. ~ Golda Meir

Never express your adverse thinking to any buddy, they will change your every opinion into pessimism. ~ Muhammad Riaz

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