Dwelling on negative thoughts is like fertilizing weeds.
I always expect the worst from this evil and wicked world and am often pleasantly surprised when the worst does not come to pass, but never or rarely surprised or upset when it does.
Don't forget to balance optimism with fact and belief with reality.
I have a habit of comparing the phraseology of communiques. . . noting a certain similarity of words, a certain similarity of optimism. . . and a certain similarity in the lack of practical results during the ensuring years.
Optimism is lack of information.
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.
We have to cover everything with the Lord himself, not a false sort of optimism, not by blinding our eyes to the evil, but by really seeing God in everything.
Optimist – A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.
No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.
Personally, I am enthusiastic about the future. You can be too. You are living in the most exciting period of time in history. Many reasons could be cited for that optimism. Yet your greatest source of hope and assurance is that you have the fulness of the teachings of the Master. They will show you how to live a good life. You can receive ordinances and covenants that when righteously lived assure true happiness and significant attainment.
We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism.
When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.
What is hope but a feeling of optimism, a thought that says things will improve, it won't always be bleak, there's a way to rise above the present circumstances. Hope is an internal awareness that you do not have to suffer forever, and that somehow, somewhere there is a remedy for despair that you will come upon if you can only maintain this expectancy in your heart.
There is a good side to every situation.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
But Walt and him shared the same kind of optimism. Walt believed in himself, and he was optimistic about what he wanted to do. He just knew it will be okay, and Dali was the same way. They had a great deal in common that way.
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.