Quotes & Sayings About False Hope

Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild, God, in His mercy, protection is showing, Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child. Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled, Still will my Father, with promise and blessing, Take to His bosom the poor orphan child. There is a thought that for strength should avail me, Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled; Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me; — Charlotte Bronte

Even under false accusation those who are in the right can afford to be calm and considerate. God is acquainted with all that is misunderstood and misinterpreted by men, and we can safely leave our case in His hands. He will as surely vindicate the cause of those who put their trust in Him as He searched out the guilt of Achan. Those who are actuated by the spirit of Christ will possess that charity which suffers long and is kind. — Ellen G. White

She had talked of this at length with Kadambari - Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they'd never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection? — Amitav Ghosh

Why wait? So precious is this life - this gift - this temporary blindness. Burn and drown and embrace the false dark, then grasp the unthinkable height of resulting joy. For in the end, in the light of truth when the flesh is cast off, there is nothing but this. — Jennifer DeLucy

And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds. — Clifford D. Simak

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

Hope was nothing but a vindictive bastard that took up residence inside and gave a false promise of something outside of your control. — Aleatha Romig

Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah. — Adam Levin

God, help me to hear Your voice speaking to my heart. Give me discernment so I can always distinguish between those who speak Your truth and those who give false prophesies filled either with fear or false hope. Help me to examine what I hear against the teaching of Your Word. Holy Spirit, guide me in all truth just as You have promised. Help me to identify what is from You and what is not. — Stormie O'martian

What Rizzoli thought, staring at her own image, was that she hated Elizabeth Hurley for giving women false hope. The brutal truth was, there are some women who will never be beautiful, and Rizzoli was one of them. — Tess Gerritsen

If war is the health of the state, despair is the health of religion. Until African workers and peasants find belief systems that provides them with real hope of happiness in the here and now, they will continue to grasp at religion's false hope of happiness in the hereafter. — Anonymous

Contrary to popular opinion or the escapist trends of society, false hope is in no way better than a harsh truth. A harsh truth is painful to accept, but there's healing at the end. False hope, on the other hand, is a very dangerous thing that offers no reward. Not immediately, nor with the passage of time. It never pays off. — Northern Adams

...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'. — Peter Watson

Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless? But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real. — Christopher Isherwood

No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is! — Sheri S. Tepper

Easy hope was usually false hope. — Dean Koontz

Before you start what?"
He shakes his head. "Not telling. You have to come and see."
There's a mischievous light in his eyes, and in that moment he looks so very much like his eight-year-old self, waiting for my decision to hire him as a guide at the Expo. Who could say no to those big, dark puppy-dog eyes?
I laugh. "Okay, okay. You win."
And even though I don't want to give him false hope, I can tell from his smile that I have. — Rysa Walker

From the cranberry cancer scare of the 1950s to the Alar-in-apples hysteria of the 1980s, from the "new ice age" of the 1960s to the "global warming" of the 1990s, environmental alarms almost always turn out to be false. Few non-political scientists fear ozone loss, global warming, or acid rain. These are just issues that some people hope to use to reorder the lives of the rest of us. — Harry Browne

I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter. Oh! - to speak the truth, and drop that tone of a false calm which long to sustain, outwears nature's endurance - I underwent in those seven weeks bitter fears and pains, strange inward trials, miserable defections of hope, intolerable encroachments of despair. This last came so near me sometimes that her breath went right through me. I used to feel it like a baleful air or sigh, penetrate deep, and make motion pause at my heart, or proceed only under unspeakable oppression. The letter - the well-beloved letter - would not come; and it was all of sweetness in life I had to look for. — Charlotte Bronte

I can read it.
I can read her.
Cuz she's thinking about how her own parents also came here with hope like my ma. She's wondering if the hope at the end of our hope is just as false as the one that was at the end of my ma's. And she;s taking the words of my ma and putting them into the mouths of her own ma and pa and hearing them say that they love her and they miss her and they wish her the world. And she's taking the song of my pa and she's weaving it into everything else till it becomes a sad thing all her own.
And it hurts her, but it's an okay hurt, but it hurts still, but it's good, but it hurts.
She hurts.
I know all this.
I know it's true.
Cuz I can read her.
I can read her Noise even tho she ain't got none.
I know who she is.
I know Viola Eade. — Patrick Ness

And when I looked up and saw you as you were, in no gaudy robes and bearing no solemn goblet - suddenly I had hope.'
'I did not see you looking,' said Mirasol.
'I did no want you to see,' said the Master.'And I looked away quickly, because I knew the hope was false. I knew - I think I knew - that it was not really about hope, it was about looking at you. And so I looked at Horuld, and at his sword, and reminded myself that they were about to kill me. — Robin McKinley

In restating this basic Christian doctrine, Benedict argues that it is not only for Christians alone. Others may not share the Christian faith in God, but the Christian proclamation that hope comes from within the person- in the realm of faith and conscience - is for them too. It offers an important protection against stifling and occasionally brutal social systems built on false hopes that come from outside the person, founded on political idealogies, economic models and social theories. — Raymond J. De Souza

No one has to know until we adopt in a few years. I'm sure there are loads of damn babies waiting for parents to buy them. We will be fine."

I know she hasn't accepted my offer of marriage, or even being in a relationship with me, but I hope she doesn't use this opportunity to remind me of that.

She laughs softly. "Damn babies? Please tell me you don't think there is a store somewhere downtown where you walk in and purchase a baby?" She lifts her hand to her mouth to stop herself from laughing at me.

"There isn't?" I joke. "What's Babies 'R' Us, then?"

"Oh my goodness!" She tilts her head back in laughter.

I reach across the small space between us and grab hold of her hand. "If that damn store isn't full of babies, lined up, ready for purchase, than I'm suing for false advertisement. — Anna Todd

Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic. — Laini Taylor

People embrace false magical theories in the hope something good will come out of them. In the most extreme of these, good comes out of them only at the end of this life, in paradise. — Subhash Kak

If you saw a dog that was hit by a car in the street, lying there, hurt, in pain, broken ... would you pick it up? Caress it? Reassure it? Then just throw it back in the street? Some people do that, just in different ways ... to other people.
Whis is worse? The one who causes the intial pain and suffering without stopping or the one who intentionally gives false hope, then injures more, and then just abandons? — Jose N. Harris

Things have their way of staying with you forever, haunting your sleep and giving you false hope. — Diyar Harraz

Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief. — Stephen Grosz

Hope Was but a timid friend;
She sat without the grated den,
Watching how my fate would tend,
Even as selfish-hearted men.
She was cruel in her fear;
Through the bars one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there,
And she turned her face away!
Like a false guard, false watch keeping,
Still, in strife, she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping;
If I listened, she would cease.
False she was, and unrelenting;
When my last joys strewed the ground,
Even Sorrow saw, repenting,
Those sad relics scattered round;
Hope, whose whisper would have given
Balm to all my frenzied pain,
Stretched her wings, and soared to heaven,
Went, and ne'er returned again! — Emily Bronte

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons. — George Orwell

That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol - blind, bloodless, and of granite core. — Charlotte Bronte

nothing is worse than the false hope someone gives you in your depression — Kim Walters

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope. — Christopher Hitchens

Evermore the Law must prepare the way for the gospel. To overlook this in instructing souls is almost certain to result in false hope, the introduction of a false standard of Christian experience, and to fill the Church with false converts ... Time will make this plain. — Charles Grandison Finney

I tried to cheer her up, and apparently succeeded in some degree, before the walk was over; but in the very act my conscience reproved me, knowing, as I did, that, sooner or later, the tie must be broken, and this was only nourishing false hopes and putting off the evil day. — Anne Bronte

What is false about hope? — Mitch Albom

It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul - I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary ... — Sarah Waters

Jack, you want to know what's going to happen to you? I'm going to torture the living crap out of you, until there is barely any life left in you. I might nurse you back to health, give you whatever false sense of hope you need, then I'm going to kill the crap out of you, over and over and over again until I feel better. — C.C. Wall

If bad men, to serve their own private ends, pretend to be religious when they are not, it is not the fault of Christianity. More importantly, it is not the fault of Christ! The Bible tells us that men are to be judged by their fruits; and the wickedness and hypocrisy of a thousand false professors does not prove religion - nor Christ Himself - to be wicked and hypocritical and false. We don't set our faith and hope on religion or Christianity, but on Christ alone. — George E. Sargent

To a man standing on the eve of battle, even false hope is better than none. — C.L. Wilson

False hope has more potential of hurting you than not having any hope at all. — Nina Levine

I followed Barry closely as we walked through the main doors of the hospital, down the corridor that smelt like disinfectant and false hope. — Belinda Jeffrey

t takes great courage to stand up against your fixed, false beliefs. — Debasish Mridha

Instantaneous and mass communication is the mother of mass naivety. Should we then lose hope? Is there any hope? But to lose hope is as dangerous as to nurture false hope. Where then can we find hope that is responsible? — Tariq Ramadan

He stands alone in hollow gloom, with the sound of his own breath whispering down unseen passages ahead and behind and to both sides, wondering how he stumbled into this blackest of all labyrinths.
He entered by choice. We all do. Whether we are mapping the heavens or skulking the lanes of the underworld, whether we are hunting the imprisoned fiend or have ourselves become the monster, whether we are searching for what is lost or hiding what must never be found, we all round that first corner by choice - and by then, we are lost.
You too. You must decide what is false and what is true, and what is true for me but not for you. We are wandering the mazes, all of us, and we cannot hope to escape until we learn to tell between what is real and what is real for someone else. There lies the madness, and the truth as well. — Troy Denning

Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
There passes for a moment the figure of a man.
His steps go with "him" in the same reality,
But I look at him and them, and they're two things:
The "man" goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,
And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.
I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.
How perfect that he is in him what he is - his body,
His true reality which doesn't have desires or hopes,
But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them. — Alberto Caeiro

I think it's very human, the hope that an all-encompassing love will change us into someone else, someone better. That this hope usually turns out to be false makes it no less human; the world is full of hopes far more unlikely than being transformed by love. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

Love is an ideal. A false hope. Marriage is the reality. And like all realities it is painful. — Anonymous

Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs - Cursed are the god-adorers, for they shall be shorn sheep! — Anton Szandor LaVey

Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. — Rebecca Solnit

No need for false hope...

...

So far where I am now... is nowhere done... just nowhere.... — Deyth Banger

Many people who come to spiritual practice are frightened by their feelings. They hope meditation will help them to transcend the messiness of the world and leave them invulnerable to difficult feelings. But this is a false transcendence, a denial of life. It is fear masquerading as wisdom. — Jack Kornfield

Fascism is on the march," Lloyd began. "And it is dangerously attractive. It gives false hope to the unemployed. It wears a spurious patriotism, as the Fascists themselves wear imitation military uniforms. — Ken Follett

Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous. — Alexander Hamilton

When you see things through your heart, there is no right or wrong, true or false, only there is love to share. — Debasish Mridha

Girls who stay true to themselves manage to find some way to respect the parts of themselves that are spiritual. They work for the betterment of the world. Girls who act from their false selves are often cynical about making the world a better place. They have given up hope. Only when they reconnect with the parts of themselves that are alive and true will they again have the energy to take on the culture and fight to save the planet. — Mary Pipher

The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us. — Neel Burton

There is no such thing as false or real hope. Hope is the brain's natural mood stabilizer. And an illusory friend that gives hope and eases the struggle of one's daily life, is much better than all the living friends who just ain't bothered. — Abhijit Naskar

It is wisdom to recognize necessity when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. — J.R.R. Tolkien

We are never free when we imprison ourselves in the prison of our fixed, false beliefs. — Debasish Mridha

We all suffer from dreams. — Bernard Cornwell

I will defeat sorrow[]I will stand my ground and be strong. I don't know when it will be but someday, I will conquer it. And I will do it without false hope. — Yuna

I let go of false hope. I let go of the hope that they would transform in favour of working on my own transformation. I let go of the hope that they would HEAR me. I let go of the hope that they would SEE me. Instead of my hope being in THEM, I listened to me. I heard me, I saw me, I validated my own pain and I began to emerge from the broken life I had been living. — Darlene Ouimet

I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I've always said - the only dignity I see is in oblivion. — Luis Bunuel

Why should I want to be rich when You were poor? Why should I desire to be famous and powerful in the eyes of men when some of those who exalted the false prophet and stoned the true rejected You and nailed You to the Cross? Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me--the hope for perfect happiness in this life--when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair? — Thomas Merton

Alif, Lam, Ra. These are the verses of the Book and a clear Qur'an.Perhaps those who disbelieve will wish that they had been Muslims.Let them eat and enjoy themselves and be diverted by [false] hope, for they are going to know.And We did not destroy any city but that for it was a known decree." Quran :Surah Chapter AL-HIJR (THE ROCKY TRACT):15 :1-4 . — Qur'an

Both scientists and laypeople can find themselves seduced into the easy trap of wanting to assign each function of the brain to a specific location. Perhaps because of pressure for simple sound bites, a steady stream of reports in the media (and even in the scientific literature) has created the false impression that the brain area for such-and-such has just been discovered. Such reports feed popular expectation and hope for easy labeling, but the true situation is much more interesting: the continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography. — David Eagleman

At best, the fellowship is founded on a false hope, and at worst, it's founded on a lie. — Robin Sloan

O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate.We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe in the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart's blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again — Rabindranath Tagore

I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms - flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too. — Truman Capote

I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another r)The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth. — Anonymous

Communism counts its opportunities in terms of decades - not of weeks. Its means of aggression consist not only of nuclear weapons and missiles with enormous boosters, and not only of spies, agents and terrorists, but of great masses of men and women, deluded by a common ideology which inspires them with a false hope. — Robert Kennedy

When we see things through our fixed, false beliefs, science becomes superstition. — Debasish Mridha

Klaus had not told his siblings about the book, because he didn't want to give them false hope. — Lemony Snicket

False hope is a dangerous tool to employ — E.J. Swift

A soul so pitiably forlorn, If such do on this earth abide, May season apathy with scorn, May turn indifference to pride; And still be not unblest- compared With him who grovels, self-debarred From all that lies within the scope Of holy faith and christian hope; Or, shipwrecked, kindles on the coast False fires, that others may be lost. — William Wordsworth

We have been told we cannot do this by a coarse of sentence: it will only grow louder and more dissident. we have been asked to pause for a reality check, we have been warned about offering this nation false hope, but in the unlikely story that is america there has never been anything false about hope.
nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change
the hopes of little girl who goes to a public school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of a little boy who learns on the streets of L.A. We will remember that there is something happening in America, that we are not as devided as our politics suggest, that we are one people, we are one nation and together we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: YES WE CAN!
yes we can to justice and equality
yes we can to oppurtunity and prosperity — Barack Obama

False hope is the bread - and - butter of my existence, the only thing that keeps me going. — Rob Payne

Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope. — James A. Michener

As Pliable and Christian find themselves walking together toward the narrow gate, we see the stark contrast between the two pilgrims. One is burdened; the other is not. One is clutching a book that is a light to his path. The other is guideless. One is on the journey in pursuit of deliverance from besetting sins and rest for his soul. The other is on the journey in order to obtain future delights that temporarily dazzle his mind. One is slow and plodding because of his great weight and a sense of his own unrighteousness; the other is light-footed and impatient to obtain all the benefits of Heaven. One is in motion because his soul has been stirred up to both fear and hope; the other is dead to any spiritual fears,
longings, or aspirations. One is seeking God; the other is seeking self-satisfaction. One is a true pilgrim; the other is false and fading.
15. — John Bunyan

We also have to give up the notion of a divine savior, which has nothing to do with what religion we belong to, but refers to the idea of someone or something who will save us without our having to go through any pain. In fact, giving up that kind of false hope is the first step. We have to be with ourselves. We have to be real people. There is no way of beating around the bush, hoping for the best. If you are really interested in working with yourself, you can't lead that kind of double life, adopting ideas, techniques, and concepts of all kinds, simply in order to get away from yourself. — Chogyam Trungpa

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed." - CHEROKEE LEGEND — Arianna Huffington

We learn by experience that happiness and pleasure are a fata morgana, which, visible from afar, vanish as we approach; that, on the other hand, suffering and pain are a reality, which makes its presence felt without any intermediary, and for its effect, stands in no need of illusion or the play of false hope. — Arthur Schopenhauer

When I look at this world I feel a deep pain.
A burden in my soul.
This overwhelming sadness threatens to engulf me, to crush me with waves of despair.

Who can I trust but you?

Our Western civilization has fallen foul to false idols.
Community is replaced by screen's of various sizes.
Friendship is reduced to a virtual status.

Yet in You I find community.
In you I find friendship.
The wife you provided, the baby on the way.

The love of this world is enmity with you.
The world's love blows hot and cold.
A politics of hate, a muffled church, neighbourhoods of fear and pain -
Broken, All Broken!
But, Your light still shines.
Pockets of hope, sparkles in the night.
The Sunrise is coming! — David Holdsworth

Go to your happy place. Go to the house, the one with the red door and the white picket fence. Go back to where nighttime meant kisses and hugs, bedtime stories and cuddles with Buster. Go to where sunrises were promises instead of just false hope. Go to where love still lives. — J.M. Darhower

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? — Arthur Miller

Over the vistas broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed in vain hope and desire ... If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually, morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever. — K.W. Jeter

There is no such thing as "false hope." Hope is not in itself a guarantee of good outcome or a cure. Hope is merely cognizing a situation as something other than hopelessness. — Richard J. Castillo

I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are. — Richard Flanagan

Suppose it was even as you think," he went on, even more gently. "Suppose that all you say was a fact, and that our Elders were but greedy tyrants, ourselves abandoned here by their selfish will and set to fulfill a false and prideful purpose. No." Jamethon's voice rose. "Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me" - his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me - "that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me, and that opposed were all the legions of the universe, still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me! — Gordon R. Dickson

For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have qualms lest our soul imbibe inferior impressions which might lead us to form a false estimate of the value of Beauty. — Marcel Proust

It's more cruel to give someone false hope than telling the bitter truth — Unknown

More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: 'Give them something to eat.' — Pope Francis

A Native American wisdom story tells of an old Cherokee who is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed. — Kristin Neff

The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, With emotion, to the man I used to be. — Barbara W. Tuchman

[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason. — Peter Drucker

Think positive. Envision your rest as you become more deprived. Envision your success as you endure more failure. Do not fuel despair with false truth. Instead, battle despair with hope. — Peter S. Fogg

Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of 'victim feminism' and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfilment and power as men, but held back by the twin myths of good-girlism and sentimental sisterhood. Though she is perhaps too sanguine about women quickly overcoming their fear of power, Wolf fills me with hope because I see her analysis as having shattered the false categories that imprisoned my generation. Women do not have to agree about everything to join in alliance with each other to promote female power. Women do not have to cast out their inner bad girl to assert their right to power. Women do not have to cast out their sexuality to be 'good sisters'. — Erica Jong

I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks. — Khaled Hosseini

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. — Barack Obama