We must cultivate our garden. Furia to God one day in seven allots; The other six to scandal she devotes. Satan, by false devotion never flammed, Bets six to one, that Furia will be damned.
Chronic negative thinking and the emotions it invokes is, like many destructive behaviors, a form of addiction. . . it may not be very pleasant, but it's familiar.
There's too much negativity in the world. Staying positive is a better investment.
When you're working on development issues, optimism is not always based on rational analysis, often it is a moral choice.
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 a left arm anymore but at least nobody will ever ask me if I'm left-handed or right-handed," but most of us would say something more along the lines of, "Aaaaaa! My arm! My arm!
No one has ever been able to convince me that optimism is not preferable to pessimism.
China was the most optimistic place I'd ever been. Everybody I met was pretty much convinced that their children would have it better than their parents had had it. It was like being in America in the 1950's, with this deep optimism about the future because everything was getting better, and that fascinated me.
But hey, what's life without a little adversity?" That had to have been the fakest attempt at optimism since my fourth grade teacher tried reasoning that we were better off without the dead kids in our class because it'd mean more turns on the playground swings for the rest of us.
I was born optimistic. . . I was laughing from the beginning of my life.
Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was made all about drugs, when to most of us, that just meant pot and magic mushrooms. He made it seem like we were all shooting heroin into our eyeballs. But that's part of the whole '60s and what it represented: feminism and civil rights and trying to stop the war. Hopefully we're starting to see some of that optimism again, through the excitement around Barack Obama.
I am a very optimistic man and only an optimistic man can bring optimism in the country.
Pessimism does win us great happy moments.
If I have tried to bring anything to federal politics, it is the idea that hope and optimism should be at their heart.
And we're also remembering the guiding light of our Judeo-Christian tradition. All of us here today are descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, sons and daughters of the same God. I believe we are bound by faith in our God, by our love for family and neighborhood, by our deep desire for a more peaceful world, and by our commitment to protect the freedom which is our legacy as Americans. These values have given a renewed sense of worth to our lives. They are infusing America with confidence and optimism that many thought we had lost.
But Anne with her elbows on the window sill, her soft cheek laid against her clasped hands, and her eyes filled with visions, looked out unheedingly across city roof and spire to that glorious dome of sunset sky and wove her dreams of a possible future from the golden tissue of youth's own optimism. All the Beyond was hers, with its possibilities lurking rosily in the oncoming years — each year a rose of promise to be woven into an immortal chaplet.
Optimism is a faith that leads to success.
The greatest architect and the one most needed is hope.
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.
What I need more in my culture and in my life right now is hope, and so I tend to write to that. I'll always end up bending more toward optimism.
Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.