Quotes About Pessimism

I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.

It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.

Life...as God intended it enables us to live above the drag of fear, superstition, shame, pessimism, guilt, anxiety, worry, and all the negativity that keeps people from seizing each day as a gift from Him.

Pessimism is not only unwarranted, it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think the cause is lost, it will be. No one works hard for a cause they think will lose.

Dark times have come, but in spite of this we have not yet reached a twilight of the gods and even today we have no reason for doubt-filled pessimism, for the Wihinei of the Aryo-Germanics is too deep - even if unconscious and latent - rooted in every Aryo-Germanic soul and it awaits onl the call to awaken which will and must catch fire in order to instill the flame of inspiration in the Aryo-Germanic sensibility.

In optimism there is magic. In pessimism there is nothing.

Many young Muslims see no opportunities for themselves and do not feel they have control over their lives or a stake in their nation's future. Such pessimism leads to disengagement. We risk losing a generation of young Muslims to apathy and extremism.

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.

As the nation at last confronts global warming, it is no time for denial, greed, cynicism or pessimism.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.

Pessimism doesn't grow your business or even maintain the status quo. The pessimists on your staff make the job harder for everyone around them. They make difficulties out of opportunities.

Though there are many differences between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, they are strikingly similar in their poor economic records and even more so in their shared pessimism and bearishness on America.

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.

When the outlook is steeped in pessimism, I remind myself, "Two and two still make four, and you can't keep humankind down for long."

I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.

There's probably a little greater case for pessimism than optimism. But I do not rule out optimism.

What I am suggesting is that each of us turn from the negativism that permeates our society and look for the remarkable good among those with whom we associate, that we speak of one another’s virtues more than we speak of one another’s faults, that optimism replace pessimism, that our faith exceed our fears. When I was a young man and was prone to speak critically, my father would say: “Cynics do not contribute, skeptics do not create, doubters do not achieve.

We must not let ourselves fall into the vortex of pessimism. Faith can move mountains!

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.