The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.