Optimism Quotes

“If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.”

“For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.”

“Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself.”

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“If we define optimism broadly as the tendency to maintain a positive outlook, then realistic optimism is the tendency to maintain a positive outlook within the constraints of the available "measurable phenomena situated in the physical and social world" (DeGrandpre, 2000, p. 733). With respect to fuzzy meaning, realistic optimism involves enhancing and focusing on the favorable aspects of our experiences. Examples include being lenient in our evaluation of past events, actively appreciating the positive aspects of our current situation, and routinely emphasizing possible opportunities for the future. With respect to fuzzy knowledge, realistic optimism involves hoping, aspiring, and searching for positive experiences while acknowledging what we do not know and accepting what we cannot know.”

“Make sure that today is better than yesterday.”

“I held my breath tightly against the shivers coursing through my body. Darkness ate away the edges of my vision and numbness stole away my fingers. I kept holding though. Watching the last bubble of precious air escape my lips. Then it became all black. But I never let go.”

“Greatness means setting out to make some difference somewhere to someone in someplace.”

“The only good thing about being frightened half to death, she thought, is that it makes me forget all about being seasick.”

“The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.”

“There's no secret on how to attain a greater height, just keep climbing the ladder, don't look at the dreadful distance, lock up that negative thoughts today, and fulfil your dreams.”

“Night always turns to day again as long as the sun shall rise, so shall it be for darkened dreams grown pale from compromise”

“Gratitude is a miracle of its own recognition. It brings out a sense of appreciation and sincerity of a being.”

“Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my fiction I think this search sometimes turns out to be a cruel delusion.No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.Some people prefer to believe in conspiracy because they are made anxious by random acts. Believing in conspiracy is almost comforting because, in a sense, a conspiracy is a story we tell each other to ward off the dread of chaotic and random acts. Conspiracy offers coherence.I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfillment in America... I see this desperation against the backdrop of brightly colored packages and products and consumer happiness and every promise that American life makes day by day and minute by minute everywhere we go. Discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer’s labor. Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract—let me live long enough to do one more book.You become a serious novelist by living long enough.”

“Never let fear hold you captive. Never let self-doubt hold you captive. Never let frustration hold you captive.”

“I’m a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There’s no middle ground, only madness and sadness.”

“Go be absolutely, positively, fucking angelic.”

“When you dream with optimism and trust, it becomes a reality fast.”

“With the sole exception of President Bill Clinton, whose 'bridge to the 21st century' evoked the vision and optimism of other great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, such as FDR and John F. Kennedy, pessimism about America's economic future has been the hallmark of modern progressivism.”

“Never let hard lessons harden your heart; the hard lessons of life are meant to make you better, not bitter.”