Optimism
- The accumulation of small, optimistic acts produces quality in our culture and in your life. Our culture resonates in tense times to individual acts of grace.--Jennifer James
- Americans are optimists. They hope they'll be wealthy someday - and they're positive they can get one more brushful of paint out of an empty can.--Bern Williams
- Be as upbeat as you can be. The basic success orientation is having an optimistic attitude.--John DePasquale
- Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all your friends feel there is something in them. Look at the sunny side of everything. Think only of the best, work only for the best, and expect only the best. Be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your won. Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. Give everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others. Bee too big for worry and too noble for anger.--Christian D. Larsen (Creed for Optimists)
- Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.--Gil Stern
- Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.--Rosabeth Moss Kanter
- Cultivate an optimistic mind, use your imagination, always consider alternatives, and dare to believe that you can make possible what others think is impossible.--Rodolfo Costa (Advice My Parents Gave Me: and Other Lessons I Learned from My Mistakes)
- The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect.--Uell Stanley Andersen
- Don't you think that the best things are already in view?--Julia Ward Howe
- The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.--Dietrich Bonhoeffer ("After Ten Years" Letters and Papers from Prison)
- Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man--Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?--Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths)
- Grab your coat, and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street.--Dorothy Fields ("On the Sunny Side of the Street")
- Gray skies are just clouds passing over.--Duke Ellington
- I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.--Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela)
- I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door--or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.--Joan Rivers
- If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.--Hazel Henderson
- 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 (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor)
- The incontestable truth is that America has been built up by optimists, not by pessimists, but by men possessing courage, confidence in the nation's destiny, by men willing to adventure, to shoulder risks terrifying to the timid.--B. C. Forbes
- It is a grand thing to live - to open the eyes in the morning and look out upon the world; to drink in the pure air and enjoy the sweet sunshine.... It is a good world to line in, in spite of the abuse we are fond of giving it.--Unknown
- It's such an act of optimism to get through a day and enjoy it and laugh and do all that without thinking about death. What spirit human beings have!--Gilda Radner
- I've never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.--Paul Harvey
- Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don’t hang around long enough for his or her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people.--Zig Ziglar
- No one has ever been able to convince me that optimism is not preferable to pessimism.--Robert Mueller
- One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn' t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.--Lucille Ball
- Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant--the digitalis of failure.--Elbert Hubbard (A Thousand and One Epigrams)
- Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.--Noam Chomsky
- Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence.--Helen Keller
- An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color- blind.--Albert Schweitzer
- An optimist is a person who sees only the lights in the picture, whereas a pessimist sees only the shadows. An idealist, however, is one who sees the light and the shadows, but in addition sees something else: the possibility of changing the picture, of making the lights prevail over the shadows.--Felix Adler
- An optimist is the human personification of spring.--Susan J. Bissonette (Reader's Digest)
- An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?--Rene Descartes
- The optimist pleasantly ponders how high his kite will fly; the pessimist woefully wonders how soon his kite will fall.--William Arthur Ward
- The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.--James Branch Caball (The Silver Stallion)
- The optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.--J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Optimists are nostalgic about the future.--Unknown (Chicago Tribune)
- Our notion of an optimist is a man who, knowing that each year was worse than the preceding, thinks next year will be better. And a pessimist is a man who knows the next year can't be any worse than the last one.--Franklin P. Adams (Nods and Becks)
- People have been wonderful to me in the good times and the bad, and I've come to believe that you do indeed reap what you sow. For those who constantly gripe about life, I turn and walk away. For those who speak negatively about people behind their backs, I move on.--Bob Losure (in Success Secrets of Super Achievers by Stovall)
- Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.--Colin Powell
- Pessimism comes from the temperament, optimism from the will.--Alain (Propos sur le bonheur)
- The pessimist borrows trouble; the optimists lend encouragement.--William Arthur Ward
- A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, an mopes; a philosopher sees both sides and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all--he's walking on them.--D. O. Glynn
- Pessimists are second rate people. They do not believe in life. ... All they want to do is drag you down and appease their own feelings of mediocrity and fear.--U. S. Anderson
- Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have no time for the pitiful.--Sean O'Faolain
- Positive thinking won't let you do anything but it will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.--Zig Ziglar (Zig Ziglar's Little Book of Big Quotes)
- Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.--Grace Paley
- So always look for the silver lining
And try to find the sunny side of life.--P. G. Wodehouse ("Look for the Silver Lining" Sally)
- Stick with the optimists. It's going to be tough enough even if they're right.--James Reston (advice to his grandson in New York Times Feb. 1980)
- Take one thing with another, and the world is a pretty good sort of a world, and it is our duty to make the best of it, and be thankful.--Benjamin Franklin (Letter to Mrs. Jane Mecom, March 1, 1766)
- There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral lows, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.--Agnes Repplier ("Are Americans Timid?")
- The truly happy person is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity.--W. Beran Wolfe
- When you have vision it affects your attitude. Your attitude is optimistic rather than pessimistic.--Charles R. Swindoll (Living Above the Level of Mediocrity)
- Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!--Robert Browning
- You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down.--Charles Chaplin
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This page last updated April 1, 2017.