Quotes & Sayings About Pessimism

Pessimism is an emotion not a philosophy. — Immortal Technique

In my heart's most secret place,
I pity them as angels do. — Sara Teasdale

I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism. — Andrew Mellon

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world. — Thomas Ligotti

I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom. — Colson Whitehead

When you always stay positive, you least worry yourself over anything at all! You only take lessons from negative moments of life, and people who seek to change your positive nature to negative! Don't ever allow your life to be negative just because of people, things and negative occurrences in life, not even for a brief moment! You are you! You are a positive person; stay positive and be happy! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies. — Ken Kesey

Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. — Scott Adams

Sexual pessimism: The equation of sexual love outside the prerequisites of reproduction with death. — Lawrence Osborne

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

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

In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes - the crime of not pretending it's for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy - the "as if." Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. — Eugene Thacker

To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make! — Criss Jami

That's art. Nothing is for everybody. — Brian Spellman

Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary. — Agatha Christie

Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter. — George Gissing

15 "probable illnesses" that are afflicting the curial body, including those of feeling "indispensable;" of excessive work habits and not enough time to rest and recharge before the Lord; of a spiritual hardening of hearts; of over-planning and not leaving room for the Holy Spirit to function; of a lack of collaboration; of living autonomously while forgetting salvation history; of vanity; of living a double life; of the "terrorism of gossip"; of egotistic opportunism; of indifference; of pessimism; of materialism; of cliquishness; and of the allures of power. — Anonymous

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. — G.K. Chesterton

Better Old King Cole and his merry soul than a hundred Jeremiahs. — Marty Rubin

My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it. — Judy Nichols

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. — Richard Flanagan

Thus far, the best that could be said for the day was that it was half over. — Daniel Polansky

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. — Harvey MacKay

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. — G.K. Chesterton

Oh happy pessimists! What a joy it is to them to be able to prove again and again that there is no joy. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent. — Tracy Letts

This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans. — Chinua Achebe

Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated. — Martin Seligman

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it's one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act. — Tobias Wolff

Mutually caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain. We need to accept the fact that it's not in the power of any human being to provide all these things all the time. for any of us, mutually caring relationships will always include some measure of unkindness and impatience, intolerance, pessimism, envy, self-doubt, and disappointment. — Fred Rogers

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh. — Hunter S. Thompson

PESSIMISM- philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. — Ambrose Bierce

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth. — Ernest Becker

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize. — Jon Meacham

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen

But pessimism and reality are usually mistaken for each other — Anna Banks

The official strategy is defensive pessimism, always. — Veronica Roth

The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy. — John Templeton

The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters. — Evgeny Morozov

The world has become jaded. Romance has died, some no longer believe in love, and because of this, they suffer. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

Love is 'evil' spelled backward
with an i instead of an o. — Avi

Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism. — Criss Jami

The glass is completely full...of shit. — Brian Spellman

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm. — Chuck Palahniuk

Enough to know no knowing. — Samuel Beckett

I ONCE READ somewhere that the odds of getting hit by lightning are one in a million. One in a friggin' million. So, if this situation were to be viewed optimistically, I'm a pretty unique individual. But here's the thing - I just got hit by lighting on my birthday, so optimism can go kiss pessimism's — E.J. Mellow

Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action. — Robert M. Sapolsky

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. — Rabindranath Tagore

Abby must have been the one who found the safe house, because Townsend didn't like it.
"The building across the street is under construction," he snarled as soon as we'd carried our bags inside.
"The elevator has key card access, and I've hacked into the surveillance cameras from every system on the block," Abby argued. "We have a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual."
"Excellent." Townsend dropped his bag. "Now the circle can see us from every angle."
"Don't mind Agent Townsend, girls," Abby told us. "He's a glass-half-empty kind of spy."
"Also known as the good kind," he countered.
Abby huffed. — Ally Carter

We have seen too much defeatism, too much pessimism, too much of a negative approach. The answer is simple: if you want something very badly, you can achieve it. It may take patience, very hard work, a real struggle, and a long time; but it can be done. That much faith is a prerequisite of any undertaking. — Margo Jones

I believe in optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. But my hope is the people, the society, which is ahead of the government. — Elif Safak

What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing — Willem Lange

The optimist is a pessimist with a plan — Bangambiki Habyarimana

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. — Margaret Mead

Americans want action for their money. They are fascinated by its self- reproducing qualities if it's put to work. Gold- hoarding goes against the American grain; it fits in better with European pessimism than with America's traditional optimism. — Paula Nelson

The optimistic nature finds joy in the very feeling for life; the pessimistic nature finds a feeling for life only in joy. — Lou Andreas-Salome

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. — Emile Durkheim

Don't pessimism and caution naturally go hand in hand? — Lynne Truss

Havel had said that people struggling for independence wanted money and recognition from other countries; they wanted more criticism of the Soviet empire from the West and more diplomatic pressure. But Havel had said that these were things they wanted; the only thing they needed was hope. Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather "an orientation of the spirit." The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong. — Bryan Stevenson

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

There will come a moment when social chains will wound almost no one, lacking people sufficiently enamored of independence and sufficiently individualized to feel these chains and suffer from them. Lacking combatants, the combat will come to an end. The small independent minority will become increasingly small.

But however small it might be, it will suffer from the increased social pressure. It will represent, in this time of almost perfect conformism and generalized social contentment, pessimism and individualism. — Georges Palante

My life is so bad that it's worse than it really is. — Brian Spellman

Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration. — Steve Toltz

I can't seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good. — John Corey Whaley

I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind! — Charles Dickens

If you want to protect your pride, you don't need people to like you! — Wataru Watari

The only color we must be cynical about is never skin color but, the color of character for what character can do, skin color may never be able to do. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world. — Helen Keller

Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person. — Upton Sinclair

Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right. — David Landes

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: ... But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?
MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
(Act I., lines 132-140) — Oscar Wilde

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. — Richard Rohr

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for. — C. JoyBell C.

Unfortunately, the world does not always act in a manner consistent with one's plans for it. — Peter David

But it's like no matter how much energy you pour into getting to the station on time, or getting on the right train, there's still no guarantee that anybody's gonna be there for you to pick you up when you get there. — Nancy Oliver

Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb. — Charlotte Bronte

I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed. — Anna Kavan

Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be. — Peter David

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish. — Jack London

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible — Arthur Schopenhauer

Every optimistic path will take you farther, faster, and to greater altitude than any road of pessimism. — Wes Fesler

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic
their pessimism or insecurity (something really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)
and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised. — Marisha Pessl

Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings - anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness - is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit. — Daniel Goleman

I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing. — Steven Morrissey

Trying to separate myself from my instincts of pessimism and cut out and define what it is that I really do love, what I'm here to be, why I'm here, and what I think is worth being alive for and fighting for. And those things change, but I think that that's something I am always chasing. — El-P

This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who's intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can't see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves. — Chuck Klosterman

I have lived through many wars and have lost everything many times Yet, life is beautiful, and I have so much to learn and enjoy. I have no space nor time for pessimism and hate. — Alice Herz-Sommer

The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The pessimist! Whenever something good came along, he knew how to make the worst of it. — Marty Rubin

I have become so pessimistic that these days I'd even choose the truth over friendship. — Milan Kundera

How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false. — Peter David

Pessimists try to convince you the world sucks, optimists already know it does and smile anyway. — Jonathan Harnisch

If you expect the worst, you'll never be disappointed. — Sarah Dessen

Let us never give in to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil offers us every day. Do not give in to pessimism and discouragement. We have the firm certainty that the Holy Spirit gives the Church with His mighty breath, the courage to persevere and also to seek new methods of evangelization, to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth. — Pope Francis

When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared. — Geraldine Brooks

The cup is both half full and half empty; it has never been one or the other. Stop obsessing over the trivial cup and drink the medicine you've been given. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Pessimism has never done anything but tear down and destroy what optimism has built up. — Orison Swett Marden