Quotes about pessimism

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.

— James Baldwin

No good deed goes unpunished.

— Clare Boothe Luce

The most prolific period of pessimism comes at twenty-one or thereabouts, when the first attempt is made to translate dreams into reality.

— Heywood Broun

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.

— Elias Canetti

If you pray for rain, don't be surprised if you're struck by lightning.

— Damien Cannon

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist --only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

— E. M. Cioran

Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure.

— Bill Clinton

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

I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.

— Clint Eastwood

Pessimism never won any battle.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn't have it, to fear and suspect the worst.

— Desiderius Erasmus

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half-empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.

— Janeane Garofalo

You've got to take the bitter with the sour.

— Samuel Goldwyn

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.

— Thomas Hardy

I've never seen a monument erected for a pessimist.

— Paul Harvey

A pessimist is one who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

— Elbert Hubbard

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

— Helen Keller

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train.

— Robert Lowell

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

— Don Marquis

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

— Ian Mcewan

In the long run, the pessimist may be proven right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.

— Daniel Readon

The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced.

— Agnes Repplier

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

— George Bernard Shaw

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

— Susan Sontag

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you're grateful.

— Paul Theroux

There is nothing sadder than a young pessimist.

— Mark Twain

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

— Mark Twain

I doubt anyone will ever see -- anywhere -- a memorial to a pessimist.

— Source Unknown

A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— George F. Will

Pessimism is as American as apple pie. Frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

— George F. Will

A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air.

— Walter Winchell