Pessimism Quotes - Page 2

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.

Ken Kesey

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

Raymond Carver

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

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.

George F. Will

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

Victor Hugo

One of the easiest things in life is to judge others. One of the simplest things we can ever do is to tell how wrong people are. One of the most thoughtless things we can ever do is to show people their faults unconstructively. It is always so easy and common to do such things but, before you do that, find the uncommon reasons for the faulty life.Yes! before you do that, identify how to correct a faulty life and before you do that, think of what drives and invokes the joy, slothfulness or the melancholy in people. Until you go through what people have been through, until you experience what has become a part of people, until you understand what drives the real interest of people and until you become fully aware of the real vision, aspirations, desires and the needs of others, ponder before you criticize!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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

William Faulkner

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

Bryant McGill

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

Harold Bloom

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

Sol Luckman

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.

Thomas Ligotti

The only color we must be cynical about is never skin color but, the color of character for what character can do, skin color may never be able to do.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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

Brian Spellman

This is Long Island, land of the rushed, home of the stressed.

Will Bly

You can't ever really have enough worth that when you're gone, the spot you left won't close over.

Laura Florand

I'm all groan up in America.

Brian Spellman

If you want to protect your pride, you don't need people to like you!

Wataru Watari

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Jonathan Kellerman

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

Shalom Auslander

It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty. I am gonna drink it through this crazy straw.

Joey Comeau

(Billy) Graham went through passages of hypochondria and his closest friends had to assure him that he was not about to die.

Nancy Gibbs & Michael Duffy

There are two words that I believe could be completely eradicated from our vocabulary – “I can’t.” These two words are so definite that they leave absolutely no room for hope. Instead, I suggest we use the phrase, “How can I?

Daniel Willey

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

Rachel Kushner

To a pessimist, losing bobby pins is as hopeless as losing hair. To an optimist, losing hair gives hope to get the lost bobby pins back.

Munia Khan

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

Roberto Rossellini

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

Marcel Proust

Don't let the disappointments of today kill tomorrow's blessings, destroy the negative flashes of pessimism, and focus on the mirror of optimism.

Michael Bassey Johnson

I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimist.

Don Marquis

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.

Malcolm Gladwell

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Philip Pullman

One physician may gravely exaggerate an illness and give up hope altogether. Another may ignorantly declare that there is no illness and that no treatment is necessary, thus deceiving the patient with false consolation. You may call the first one pessimistic and the second one optimistic. Both are equally dangerous.

Walpola Rahula

We’re programmed to imagine bad things happening to us, as opposed to good things, even if the good are more likely. It’s kind of a protective pessimism: if we worry about the worst happening, it may miss our door.

Ruth Dugdall

The Admiral so regrets failure, he cannot THINK of success.

John Taliaferro

To a great extent in spiritual things we get what we expect of the Lord. Faith alone can bring us to see Jesus.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

In the Soviet Union we have a saying, a pessimist is someone who believes things can't get any worse. An optimist thinks maybe they can.

Abel Aganbegyan

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?

Wayne Gerard Trotman

The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she'd the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn't have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world.

Paul Auster

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Michael Lewis

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Michael Lewis

We choose the prism that we use to view life. Life can be a mystical tour or an outright bummer. We can live our life with the taint of aftermath or look forward to embracing each beguiling day with renewed energy and enthusiasm.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for.

C. JoyBell C.

It is our non negotiable responsibility to always stay positive, no matter what! The only thing that can make you negative is the thing you allow to make you negative! Think well and stay positive!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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.

McCall Hoyle

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

James Baldwin

We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)

Oscar Wilde

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

Rowena Cory Daniells

...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.

Susin Nielsen

We're living among infinite possibilities. And the prevalent philosophies of post-modernist pessimism that come out of the universities are really a major tragedy. The opportunities for progress and change… are absolutely tremendous. Anybody who tells you that we're running out of resources or in a terrible mess--they are idiots. We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. To say we are running out of resources is like saying we are running out of brain cells.

Robert Anton Wilson

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.

John Marmysz

Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism.

Criss Jami

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley

What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.

Voltaire

...if you live feeling likeYour glass is half empty, well,It may as well be empty all the way.

Mattie J.T. Stepanek

I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed.

Tamar Myers

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Pessimism Quotes - Page 2

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