English Hope Thoughts

"Once you have identified with some form of negativity , you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed , angry, or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane"

"Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science... Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim — like that of science — was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity"

"Despite the cautions just raised, there is abundant reason to believe that optimism – big, little, and in between – is useful to a person because positive expectations can be self-fulfilling"

"The state of modernity is not the same as the state of the world but the rational optimists ignore that. For the rational optimists, any data … that doesn’t fit the narrative are either ignored or glossed over"

"Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing when parents make from their children's souls paralytics"

"Optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind"

"“What hope can a man have,” my father had once shouted at me, “if he has none of Heaven?” Even in 1910 he thought the world a vale of tears without relent. “The hope of enlightened life,” I had replied then"

"Optimist" is a word which here refers to a person...who thinks pleasant thoughts about nearly everything. For instance, if an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well, this isn't too bad. I don't have my arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me if I am right-handed or left-handed", but most of us would say something more along the lines of "Aaaaah! My arm! My arm!"

"This tree is our symbol . Our affirmation of Life , and everyone in this town gives part of their water rations to keep it alive. We've learned, administrator, that hope is a powerful weapon against anything, even drought"

"This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant"

"It is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. As long as there is a margin of hope, however narrow, we have no choice but to base all our actions on that margin. America and Russia have one interest in common which may override all their other interests: to be able to live with the bomb without getting into an all-out war that neither of them wants"

"Seen from a higher perspective , conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is - which is the only sane way to live - there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore. There is only a higher good - which includes the "bad." Seen from the perspective of the mind, however, there is good-bad, like-dislike, love-hate"