Browsing Topic Best Pessimism Quotes

Compassion is the basis of morality.

Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Pessimism is an emotion not a philosophy.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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.

When the worms are scarce, what does a hen do? Does she stop scratching? She does not. She scratches all the harder. A lot of businessmen have been showing less sense than a hen since orders became scarce. They have laid off salesmen; they have stopped or reduced their advertising; they have simply resigned themselves to inaction and, of course, to pessimism. If a hen knows enough to scratch all the harder when the worms are scarce, surely businessmen … ought to have gumption enough to scratch all the harder for business.

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

Zionism and pessimism are not compatible.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.

Pessimism is a waste of time.

Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

A pinch of praise is worth a pound of scorn. A dash of encouragement is more helpful than a dipper of pessimism. A cup of kindness is better than a cupboard of criticism.

Mine is an enthusiastic and dionysian pessimism, like a flame that sets my vital exuberance ablaze, that mocks at any theoretical, scientific or moral prison.

The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

If I make dark my countenance, I shut my life from happier chance.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.

In securing the future of the planet, we secure happiness for ourselves. One of the aims of the Greens is to turn around the tide of pessimism amongst the young people of the world.

All religions promise a reward beyond life, in eternity, for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.

Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles, for then he is off his guard.

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?

Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?