"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
— Winston S. Churchill

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else."
— Winston S. Churchill

"It's not about hair loss. It's about face GAIN. I hear the term, 'receding hairline'. I say, 'Expanding Facial Fronteir'. One day I might have a whole head of FACE."
— Sheng Wang

"'It's snowing still,' said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is"
"And freezing"
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.""
— A.A. Milne

"TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
— Howard Zinn

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.
"
— Thomas L. Friedman

"No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse. (Apr 2007 Gen Conf)"
— Jeffrey R. Holland

"I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death."
— Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela)

"Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost."
— Helen Keller

"One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem."
— Alexander Jodorowsky

"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself."
— Lucille Ball

"My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud."
— Henry Rollins

"Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning."
— Mahatma Gandhi

""The Door of opportunity awaits you...Now fling it open and see whats inside!""
— Amy Harley

"a pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."
— George Bernard Shaw

"My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else.

Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself."
— Arthur C. Clarke

"Life is like Tetris. If it doesn't fit, just flip it over "
— Sabine Hein

"If I can't joke about imminent death, then I might as well just resign."
— James A. Owen (The Search for the Red Dragon)

""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 (As the World Churns)

"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so."
— Noam Chomsky

"Perpetual Optimism is a Force Multiplier."
— Colin Powell

"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."
— Steve Voake (The Dreamwalker's Child)

"We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative."
— James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy)

"The spirit of the gospel is optimistic; it trusts in God and looks on the bright side of things. The opposite or pessimistic spirit drags men down and away from God, looks on the dark side, murmurs, complains, and is slow to yield obedience."
— Orson F. Whitney

"i find nothing more depressing than optimism."
— Paul Fussell

"Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times."
— Bernard Beckett (Genesis)

"It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm."
— John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids)

"Keep yourself in line
Release your perfect smile
Forget the friend who lied
And breathe with arms wide open one more time"
— Urma

"We can become inspired to shape a higher, more ideal future, and when we do, miracles happen."
— James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision)

"He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had."
— T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)

""The pessimist complains about the wind; the optomist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
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— William Arthur Ward college administrator writer 1921-1994

"It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"Few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push - a smile. A word of optimism and hope, a 'you can do it!' when things are tough"
— Richard M DeVos

"Thou hast seen nothing yet."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness."
— Terry Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate)

""You never know what will be in the mailbox the next day.""
— Laren Stover