Quotes on Pessimism

Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

Optimism, pessimism, f**k that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.

A few modern philosopher's assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.... With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.

It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.

Bull-markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.

Pessimism is a form of mental dipsomania; it disdains healthy nourishment, indulges in the strong drink of denunciation, and creates an artificial dejection which thirsts for a stronger draught.

Pessimism doesn't grow your business or even maintain the status quo. The pessimists on your staff make the job harder for everyone around them. They make difficulties out of opportunities.

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.

You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves; fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future.

We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.

Cease negative mental chattering. If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.