Wishful Quotes & Sayings

Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat. — Ben Shapiro

Everything you imagine can come true. — Lailah Gifty Akita

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it. — Richard Dawkins

This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England. — Andrea Mays

The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking. — John Ortberg

Suddenly, the double doors of the parlor whooshed open. A large fleshy woman stood before me in full regalia. Her eyes were all made up, earrings and bracelets jangling. The sign in the window said Miss Sadie was a medium. From the look of her, I'd say that was a bit wishful. — Clare Vanderpool

I might not yet be falling in love, but I might be flirting with the promise of love, the idea of love, the making of a place in my heart for love, though it may have been more a wish than a promise. — Diane Meier

Never wish to be somebody. You never know what they are made up of. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? — C.S. Lewis

The French Foreign Office, wishful to allay the anger of the Parisian mob clamouring for war with England, secured this admirable couple and sent them round the town. You cannot be amused at a thing, and at the same time want to kill it. The French nation saw the English citizen and citizeness - no caricature, but the living reality - and their indignation exploded in laughter. The success of the stratagem prompted them later on to offer their services to the German Government, with the beneficial results that we all know. — Jerome K. Jerome

You will never be able to see clearly when people around you distort your view of truth with their own clouded version. You will begin to read into everything incorrectly and find yourself lost in a delusional story stitched together from the crumbs of over analyzed words once spoken, misunderstandings or speculation. Life should not be wasted by collecting clues or piecing together a puzzle about how someone feels. Love is straightforward and it is clearly seen on the cloudiest days of your life. If someone loves you it will be obvious. They won't let you go, until you ask them to. — Shannon L. Alder

Where there is life there is wishful thinking. — Gerald F. Lieberman

As long as the positive thinking doesn't become so extreme that you are in denial of reality, I don't like to see myself as a positive nor a negative type of person but primarily a realist in search of solutions to acknowledged problems......ignoring a problem doesn't make it disappear , that kind of thought process is just wishful thinking and sooner or later the reality will come around and bite you. — John Balmer

My plans are still in embryo, a town on the edge of wishful thinking. — Groucho Marx

When circumstances feel as if they are turning surreal, like the current political situation. We can be guaranteed, our intuition will lead the way to the truth, as long as we don't live in a world of wishful thinking. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

At first glance, the idea that some UFOs may be vehicles from outside the Earth seems utterly preposterous, the baseless result of wishful thinking by highly unscientific minds. — Don Berliner

IV The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
V If the many become the same as the few, when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.
VI If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. — William Blake

I just sit where I'm put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
and caress you into darkness and paradise. — Louise Penny

I love you, lirsha — Larissa Ione

I can't see you at all, actually. I'm . . . pretty sure I'm in love with Travis."
My whole world stopped. I tried to replay her words over. Had I heard them correctly? Did she really just say what I thought she had, or was it just wishful thinking? — Jamie McGuire

Biblical hope is not wishful thinking or an optimistic outlook; rather, it is a confident expectation based on the certainty of God's Word that as He has anchored us in the past, so He will in the future. — David Wilkerson

And he'd laughed a lot as he'd helped improve her proposal. It felt good to work with someone who respected her opinion. She could see now that her earlier drafts were juvenile, full of wishful thinking, but Quentin forced her to dig deeper and work harder. Every paragraph of this document was dense with solid reasoning, including the numbers to back her assertions. — Elizabeth Camden

If coffee were like dreams, then I would be wired in constant bliss, never needing sleep to live out my dreams. — Anthony Liccione

underneath the chilly grey november sky
we can make believe that kennedy is still alive and
we're shooting for the moon and smiling,
jackie's driving by and

they say, good try — Andy Prieboy

There are stories, like maps that agree ... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking ... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything. — Thomas Pynchon

Our desires correspond precisely to God's plans. It's not that we want something, so we engage in wishful thinking that what we want exists. It's the opposite - the reason we want it is precisely because God has planned for it to exist. As we'll see, resurrected people living in a resurrected universe isn't our idea - it's God's. — Randy Alcorn

Unplanned process improvement is wishful thinking. — Watts Humphrey

Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness." If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it. — Marc Ian Barasch

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions. — Zora Neale Hurston

Hope was right below wishful thinking and above a rain fucking dance. — V. Theia

You cannot transform the world by wishful thinking -- you must do something about it. — Jonathan Black

AKHLYS LUNGED AT PERCY, and for a split second he thought: Well, hey, I'm just smoke. She can't touch me, right? He imagined the Fates up in Olympus, laughing at his wishful thinking: LOL, NOOB! The — Rick Riordan

There is a great deal of wishful thinking in such cases it is the easiest thing of all to deceive ones self. — Demosthenes

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. — Sigmund Freud

The nice girl loses an important protective mechanism when she assumes that life is fair, or that Prince Charming will always protect her. The smart fox is not governed by wishful thinking or the hope of a fantasy outcome, like Cinderella. Despite appearances, she trusts herself to watch her OWN back instead of giving a man the responsibility of doing it for her. — Sherry Argov

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it. — Oscar Wilde

Physical fitness can neither be achieved by wishful thinking nor outright purchase. — Joseph Pilates

Perversion is used only to overcome moral prejudices or conformity; the mind and desire must become amoral, focused and made entirely acceptive so that the life-force is free of inhibitions prior to the control. Thus, the Sabbath becomes a deliberate sex-orgy for the purpose of materialization: the Great Reality of 'as if (wishful thinking). Sex is fully exploited: he who injures none, himself does not injure. — Anonymous

Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification. — Mary McCarthy

If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true. — Nancy Pickard

[There] are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them. Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away. — Irving Langmuir

We live in a time of global transformation. The power on Earth no longer lies with the forces of imperialistic globalisation, but with those groups who are now connecting with the forces of transformation. It is not terror and violence, but trust and solidarity which will lead the new world. This is not just a wishful dream, but the objective reality of the coming epoch. — Dieter Duhm

I suppose ... in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was ... it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were. — John McGahern

God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Perhaps the mirror in Sally's dressing room had waved the wrong way and caused her to look larger than she actually was. And perhaps all that skipping had jumbled her brain and affected her ability to separate reality from wishful thinking. — Joanne Fluke

The graceful wings of a dove lead to the endless imagination in a dream wings of pain. — Auliq Ice

Wishful thinking doesn't change reality. — Lee Strobel

Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things. — Ruth Ozeki

There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope? — Garth Risk Hallberg

The major barrier to understanding is wishful thinking and following that which pleases one. — Idries Shah

they should invent a car that stays cool inside when it is parked — R.L. Stine

Kiss a frog with your eyes wide open. If he turns into a prince you won't miss the transformation, but if he doesn't, you won't be fooled by some wishful illusion in your head. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Renunciation isn't a moral imperative or a form of self-denial. It's simply cooperation with the way things are: for moments do pass away, one after the other. Resisting this natural unfolding doesn't change it; resistance only makes it painful. So we renounce our resistance, our noncooperation, our stubborn refusal to enter life as it is. We renounce our fantasy of a beautiful past and an exciting future we can cherish and hold on to. Life just isn't like this. Life, time, is letting go, moment after moment. Life and time redeem themselves constantly, heal themselves constantly, only we don't know this, and much as we long to be healed and redeemed, we refuse to recognize this truth. This is why the sirens' songs are so attractive and so deadly. They propose a world of indulgence and wishful thinking, an unreal world that is seductive and destructive. (142) — Norman Fischer

I'm not pro-war. But I think war has been the dominant condition of humankind, and peace has been the anomaly - certainly sustained periods of peace that profit great masses of people - and I think war has worked, even awful hellish wars: worked to staunch fascist aggression in Europe, worked to preserve the Union after secession in the United States, etc. Not always, maybe not often, but to say never is to reject history in favor of a wishful unreality. — Philip Gourevitch

It shouldn't make you sad to know you're loved, Grayson. But it did. It made him sad, and panicked, and for just a moment, wishful. — Nora Roberts

To be a good trader, you need to trade with your eyes open, recognize real trends and turns, and not waste time or energy on regrets and wishful thinking. — Alexander Elder

Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. — Chuck Palahniuk

Despite Tub's eye wound he never so much as stumbled, and I felt for the first time that we knew and understood each other; I sensed in him a desire to improve himself, which perhaps was whimsy or wishful thinking on my part, but such are the musings of the traveling man. The — Patrick DeWitt

The future rushes in and all we can do is take our memories and move forward with them. Memory keeps only what it wants. Images from memories are sprinkled throughout our lives, but that does not mean we must believe that our own or other people's memories are of things that really happened. When someone stubbornly insists that they saw something with their own eyes, I take it as a statement mixed with wishful thinking. As what they want to believe. Yet as imperfect as memories are, whenever I am faced with one, I cannot help getting lost in thought. Especially when that memory reminds me of what it felt like to be always out of place and always a step behind. Why was it so hard for me to open my eyes every morning, why was I so afraid to form a relationship with anyone, and why was I nevertheless able to break down my walls and find him? — Kyung-Sook Shin

Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and the in the end, despair. — C.S. Lewis

Fundamental security comes from realizing that you have broken through something. You reflect back and realize that you used to be extraordinarily paranoid and neurotic, watching each step you made, thinking you might lose your sanity, that situations were always threatening in some way. Now you are free of all those fears and preconceptions. You discover that you have something to give rather than having to demand from others, having to grasp all the time. For the first time, you are a rich person, you contain basic sanity. You have something to offer, you are able to work with your fellow sentient beings, you do not have to reassure yourself anymore. Reassurance implies a mentality of poverty--you are checking yourself, "Do I have it? How could I do it?" But the bodhisattva's delight in his richness is based upon experience rather than theory or wishful thinking. It is so, directly, fundamentally. He is fundamentally rich and so can delight in generosity. — Chogyam Trungpa

Imagining God can be so different from wishful thinking, if your spiritual experiences change your behavior over time. Have you become more generous, which is the ultimate healing? Or more patient, which is a close second? Did your world become bigger and juicier and more tender? Have you become ever so slightly kinder to yourself? This is how you tell. — Anne Lamott

You have got to have a concept of the volume around here."

"Was the dream wishful thinking, or could Spirit be indestructible, like the conservation of matter, hidden from the conscious mind but perceived by the unconscious? — Phil Arnold

I'm not talking to you from the point of view of wishful thinking or imaginary craziness. i'm talking to you from a deeper, basic understanding. — Fred Alan Wolf

Turn wishful thinking into positive action. Those who take a proactive stance in their lives tend to have an ample supply of joy and pleasure — Cheryl Saban

It is the link between satisfaction and redress
the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy
that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire
make it literally unreal
with pictures of its satisfaction. Pornography, for example, can easily be used, among many other things, to pre-empt the elaboration of erotic fantasy; it can be, in Masud Kahn's words, 'the stealer of dreams'. To put it in old-fashioned Freudian language, fantasies of satisfaction are defences against desiring, the attempt in fantasy to take the risk out of desire; or to put it in more Kleinian language, fantasies of satisfaction are attacks upon desire; they are, in fact, against desiring, both up against it and in opposition to it. Our fantasies of satisfaction are clues to our fears about desiring. Wishful fantasies are the original sins of omission. — Adam Phillips

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love. — Caryll Houselander

The angry reaction supports the academic literature on Appalachian Americans. In a December 2000 paper, sociologists Carol A. Markstrom, Sheila K. Marshall, and Robin J. Tryon found that avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping "significantly predicted resiliency" among Appalachian teens. Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly. We — J.D. Vance

Most people's religion is what they want to believe, not what they do believe. — Luther Burbank

The whole iconography of ancient science is simply the fruit of wishful thinking. — George Sarton

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. — Alberto Manguel

[H]eavenly personality, or the perpetuation of human personality in heaven is nothing else than personality released from all earthly encumbrances and limitations[.] [H]ere we are men, there gods[.] — Ludwig Feuerbach

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn't wishful thinking. It's the rule. — A.A. Gill

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. — C.S. Lewis

From at least the age of six, romantic longing
Sechnsucht
has played an unusually central part of my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing. — C.S. Lewis

to hope was to expect — Jane Austen

You rise to a higher level of consciousness by taking your attention away from your present limitations and placing it upon that which you desire to be. Do not attempt this in day-dreaming or wishful thinking but in a positive manner. Claim yourself to be the thing desired. I AM that; no sacrifice, no diet, no human tricks. All that is asked of you is to accept your desire. If you dare claim it, you will express it. — Neville Goddard

Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That's the acid test. — Guy Kawasaki

I walk along an ever fading line between jaded and wishful thinking. — Sara Secora

The 'Rise, Rebel, Resist' video is a reflection of the outrage the American people are feeling at the absurd hypocrisy, and overwhelming nonsense and balderdash plaguing Washington D.C. It uses a bit of satire and a bit of wishful thinking to form this powerful amalgam of imagery that nourishes and empowers the living art of the song. Our message is clear: Either these elected officials do their job and protect the rights and lives of ALL Americans or be prepared to face the consequences. — Otep Shamaya

I fantasized how no matter what happened, no one could ever come between us, call it wishful thinking, I called it a fact. — Holly Hood

Something else I learnt...is respect for reality as against all the many alternatives to it--conventional assumptions, fashionable ways of looking at things, ideologies, social or personal aspirations, fears, intentions, wishful thinking, religious claims, and the rest... — Bryan Magee

I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking. — Angela Carter

Religion: A lot of fanciful ideas inspired by wishful thinking. Science: A lot of logical ideas based on the best evidence available. Which should we have faith in? — David Alan Harvey

(The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.) — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Sometimes it seems that half of the fairy tales of the world are some form of Cinderella, ugly duckling, or poor boy story, telling of the little person who has no power or possessions who ends up being king or queen, prince or princess. We write it off as wishful dreaming, when it is actually the foundational pattern of disguise or amnesia, loss, and recovery. Every Beauty is sleeping, it seems, before it can meet its Prince. The duckling must be "ugly," or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection. It is written in our hardwiring, but can only be heard at the soul level. It will usually be resisted and opposed at the ego level. — Richard Rohr

Never act upon wishful thinking. Act without checking the facts, and chances are that you will be swept away along with the mob. — Jim Rogers

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Let us use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems without relying on prayers and wishful thinking. When we have faith in ourselves, we will find we do not have to have faith in gods. — Ruth Hurmence Green

There are two sorts of political communications operators in this business. There are people who see the population as they would like them to be, and there are people who see the population, ruthlessly, as they actually are. There is the wishful-thinking element, and there is the winning element. — Tim Shipman

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss. — Deb Caletti

I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. — Barack Obama

You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia. — Irvine Welsh

If Christianity is to be discounted as wishful thinking because it removes fear of meaninglessness and annihilation, then secularism should be open to the same charge, since it removes the hated ideas of an absolute superior and of real responsibility. — Richard L. Purtill

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking. — Amy Tan

The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism. — J. Christopher Herold

Don't settle for wishful thinking; make peace in your heart a reality. — Woodrow M. Kroll

Thanks to the discrepancies between people's thoughts and their actions, and to the diversity of their wishful impulses. — Sigmund Freud

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking. — Fay Weldon

I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn't be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something. If she had told me why she cut herself all the time, or that it was the pills that made her act so spaced out, or that she was even on pills, or even saw doctors, or any of it, I would have done my best to help her. I'm not saying I'm a superhero. I'm not saying I would have just swooped down and saved her. I'm just saying the only reason everything was a waste was that she made it a waste. That whole time, back when I was just a normal kid in high school, living out my normal life, I really thought everything mattered. — Nina LaCour