The Spirit of Hope Quotes

“Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.54”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

“Ser libre significa no estar sometido a presiones. Sin embargo”
― Byung-Chul Han, El espíritu de la esperanza

“La modalidad temporal de la esperanza es el todavía no. Ella está abierta a lo venidero”
― Byung-Chul Han, El espíritu de la esperanza

“esperanza no es optimismo. No es el convencimiento de que algo saldrá bien, sino la certeza de que algo tiene sentido, al margen de cómo salga luego.”
― Byung-Chul Han, El espíritu de la esperanza

“In Children of Men, humanity falls into collective depression. The act of birth, a synonym for a future whose task is to create the new, no longer takes place. The coming-into-the-world, giving birth, is altogether undone. The world resembles a hell of the same. Depression robs humanity of all hope. The depressed, exhausted future consists of the constant repetition of the same. Nothing opens up. Nothing new enters the world. The invigorating, encouraging, inspiring future, that is, ‘l’avenir’, is entirely absent. No departure, no tomorrow, no incipit vita nova, no escape from the same, from the old, seems possible. Depression is the exact opposite of hope, which is passion for the new. Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

“Anxiety radically narrows the field of possibilities and thus makes it harder to gain access to the new, to the not-yet-existing. For this reason, it is opposed to hope, which sharpens the sense of possibility and kindles the passion for the new, for the wholly other. Were we to base our analysis of Dasein on hope rather than anxiety, we would discover a completely different notion of existence, even a different world.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope