Pessimism Quotes

When I was born, the doctor slit my throat to see if I could talk.

There is no such thing as magic," she told me. "You can b e l i e v e all you want, but it's never going to do you any good. Nobody flies. We only fall

For you the cup isn't half full or half empty, you're always topping it up.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

If you are rude, cynical, habitually-sarcastic or pessimistic, your life options are going to be very limited.

When it rains it pours and when it shines you get melanoma.

The author says people are guilty of "wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck.

My life is so bad that it's worse than it really is.

Life is like butter - when things cool down it can be reshaped

Only in this world of topsy-turvy attitudes could outright stupidity, such as I had displayed, be something that got me high marks. I had an amused glimmering of a notion at that point: If I ever turned out to be a complete and utter fool, I could wind up running the whole kingdom. It was something to consider.

I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.

As every good marxist already knows, the ideological shift toward a terminally optimistic humanism was vital to the rise of bourgeoisie, and the decline of aristocracy.

Life has too many disappointments to make room for negativity.

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

If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on another, it is easy to forget there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism, exactly the same grounds, in fact. That is because we are human. We still have every potential for good as we ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect in one another. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and degradations for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate.

The optimist is a pessimist with a plan

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.

Doubt is a form of pessimism that acts as an agent, which is sent to hinder prosperity on its materilization journey.

...studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists.""I find that hard to believe""Of course you do, you're an optimist. You have a misguided belief that things will go your way. You don't see the dangers till it's too late. Pessimists are more realistic. "That seems like a sad way to govern your life.""It's a safe way to govern your life.

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience"."What's pessimism?" I said."Religion without God.

When things are at their blackest, I say to myself, 'Cheer up, things could be worse.' And sure enough, they get worse.

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.

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

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.

Don't you ever think that your mind can never harm you just because it is your mind! Your mind can really kill you. From dawn to the time you retire, your mind can be a very good friend to you and your mind can also be your worst friend. What goes into your mind each day becomes your friend so mind your mind!

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look around them.

It’s not a lack of opportunity around me. Rather, it’s a lack of faith within me.

The world has become jaded. Romance has died, some no longer believe in love, and because of this, they suffer.

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.

However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is to get well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some purely morbid and exaggerated ill-humor. No special effort to overcome their feelings is necessary, nor do such people require to be worked up in order to take the step; but as soon as the keeper into whose charge they are given leaves them for a couple of minutes, they quickly bring their life to an end.When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.

Fear least have power! The power of fear lies in the power of our fears. Without the power of our fears, fear is least empowered!

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

Masturbation = Imagination + Activity. Worry = Imagination + Negativity.

Though nihilism has been relentlessly criticized for overemphasizing the dark side of human experience, it might be equally true that this overemphasis represents a needed counterbalance to shallow optimism and arrogant confidence in human power. Nihilism reminds us that we are not gods, and that despite all of the accomplishments and wonders of civilization, humans cannot alter the fact that they possess only a finite amount of mastery and control over their own destinies.

Fuck you! I hope you die!""Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you.

My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with

Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic.

There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.

The pessimist may call the optimist a fool; but who is more foolish, the happy individual who expects more happiness or the one who fills his life with bitterness and has only more despair to look forward to?

Someone who smiles too much with you can sometime frown too much with you at your back.

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

Do this exercise: Demolish the bridges of pessimism behind you. If you do this very well, you'll have no other choice than to move forward! Successful people are always optimistic!

It’s not about optimism, pessimism or realism. It’s not about thinking nothing bad will ever happen to you. It’s about having the faith and courage that no matter what happens, you’ll be okay.

If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.

Life presents innumerable possibilities for love, friendship, compassion, and self-fulfillment, but we must be willing to give in order to receive. Persistence, sacrifice, a quest for knowledge, along with acquaintance with our true self is essential in order to achieve our dreams. Panic, fear, worry, doubt, anger, and a negative attitude are the biggest impediments to self-realization. The most important battle we undertake in life is not with other people; rather it takes place in the human mind.

To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make!

The optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist as half empty. What I see is water that can save someone's life.

One day you're waiting for the sky to fallThe next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all

All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence which exists of both friends and enemies. They in turn have their own friends and enemies with whom they interact. That is a given. But we, each of us, tend to put ourselves ahead of others because we believe that we are significant. We must attend to our own needs, desires, wants, and aspirations, because each of us is our own greatest priority. No one else cares for us as much as we do, no one else can exist in our skin. We think we're important. It is where our sense of self-worth comes up, where our egos reside, where "we" are. And we believe that each of our lives means something.