pessimism Quotes

“There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites.”

“The play-it-safe pessimists of the world never accomplish much of anything, because they don’t look clearly and objectively at situations, they don’t recognize or believe in their own abilities to overcome even the smallest amount of risk.”

“I’ll be ready for it to happen and that way it won’t happen. It’s a burden, being able to control situations with my hyper-vigilance, but it’s my lot in life.”

“My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

“Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists.”

“I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.”

“How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.”

“The vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be.”

“This is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous.”

“It is well to pitch one’s expectations low, and so stave off disappointment.”

“Anxiety and apprehension should have been the furthest things from my mind. But because I am a pessimist and must always keep sticking my tongue in pessimism the way you do a sore tooth I couldn’t help thinking that it was all too easy. Things just aren’t this easy for people...Something or somebody is bound to come and spoil it...so you can just get yourself ready for it.”

“If I don’t die in a fortnight I am to live to be a shrivelled old man. I’d rather take a happy medium, and look forward to coming back before my liver is all gone, or my temper all destroyed, with lots of money to make you and the girls comfortable.”

“According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.”

“Fritz had had to stop himself or interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily -as we shall see with Fritz’s own story in a page or two. Still Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

“People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”

“What is in all this beauty for me when every minute, every second I am obliged, forced to know that even this tiny gnat, buzzing near me in the sunlight now, is taking part in all this banquet and chorus, knows its place in it, loves it, and is happy, and I alone am an outcast.”

“Nothing ever was as good these days as it had been when he was a young man. Horses could not run so fast, young men were not so brave and dashing, women were not so pretty, flowers did not grow so well, and as for dogs, if there were any decent ones left in the world, it was because they were in his own kennels.”

″‘The boys like me as a pal but I don’t believe anyone will ever really fall in love with me.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Emily reassuringly. ‘Nine out of ten men will fall in love with you.’ ‘But it will be the tenth I’ll want,’ persisted Ilse gloomily.”