Pessimism Quotes
247 quotes
"You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down"
"Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses."
"I wish to weepbut sorrow isstupid.I wish to believebut belief is agraveyard."
"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others."
"The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die."
"Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity."
"Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst."
"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."
"School prepares you for the real world... which also bites."
"Fuck you! I hope you die!""Everybody Dies,"I said. "So fuck you."
"This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?"
"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back."
"See the moon? It hates us."
"Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls."
"The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey."
"But when nothing in your life happens in a positive frame, it is difficult to think positively and hope for the best."
"There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable."
"Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular."
"In my heart's most secret place,I pity them as angels do."
"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible"
"With no positivity, there is no hope; with no negativity, there is no improvement."
"He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish."
"Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference."
"I can’t can’t, but since I can’t, I clearly can."
"A pessimist? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself and hates them for it."
"Thus far, the best that could be said for the day was that it was half over."
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
"Fuck you! I hope you die!""Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you."
"In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171"
"Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust."
"Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in."
"When I was born, the doctor slit my throat to see if I could talk."
"Don’t ever let desperation take the seat of inspiration in you! Always live inspired no matter what! For though something might be wrong somewhere, something is always right somewhere! If you have life, be alive and smile!"
"No, you pessimistic fool, I am saying that if we can find it in ourselves to be miserable even when things are actually pretty good then there should be no difficulty being happy even when there is gloom and doom all around us."
"The optimist's hope and the pessimist's despair: reciprocal illusions."
"There must be logical minds among all species if they hope to survive. Not everyone can be bridled with hope and optimism."
"Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism."
"If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short."
"There is a very thin line of difference between a Pessimist and a Perfectionist. Both are scared to fail, strive for ideal but the only think unlike in the two is- Pessimist thinks it will last forever and Perfectionist knows it won't."
"Life curses some poor people with the love of luxury, while it blesses some with the very same thing."
"When it is dark enough you can see the stars."
"There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle."
"When things come to the worst they generally mend."
"It’s not a lack of opportunity around me. Rather, it’s a lack of faith within me."
"I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!"
"A pessimist is one who feels bad when he feels good for fear he'll feel worse when he feels better."
"How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy."
"The Admiral so regrets failure, he cannot THINK of success."
John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes : The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt
"POZZO:I am blind.(Silence.)ESTRAGON:Perhaps he can see into the future."
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