Quotes on Pessimism

Some recent philosophers seem to have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that affirm that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we will try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

We must not let ourselves fall into the vortex of pessimism. Faith can move mountains!

Hope transforms pessimism into optimism. Hope is invincible.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, have you grown old.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.

The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.

Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

In truth the most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.