Hope and Optimism

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

All the windows of my heart I open to the day.

To those who have given up on love, I say, ‘trust life a little bit.’

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.

The experience of drought and dust storms remains central to the psychology of the prairie west; more than the intermittent affluence of postwar decades, it tints a westerner’s outlook on life. He continues to live in next year country, where he smokes a pack of hope a day.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.

In every winter’s heart there is a quivering spring, and behind the veil of each night there is a smiling dawn.

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is not having anything to wait for that is terrible.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody—it saves so much trouble.

The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.

Never discourage anyone.. who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.

Let him take heart who does advance, even in the smallest degree.