Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

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

Life... It tends to respond to our outlook, to shape itself to meet our expectations.

I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.

No matter what happens to us in life, we tend to think of it as 'good' or 'bad.' And most of us tend to use the 'bad' label three to 10 times as often as the 'good' label. And when we say something is bad, the odds grow overwhelming that we will experience it as such.

Our thoughts about an event can have a dramatic effect on how we go through the event itself. When our expectations are low, it's easy to be pleasantly surprised. When they're not, we're vulnerable to painful disappointment. Because of this, many people spend a good deal of effort trying to avoid developing high hopes about anything.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.

And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.

Negative thinking definitely attracts negative results.

An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to.

I wouldn't say that I relax and enjoy anything. But I think my pessimism helps. I never really expect anything good to happen, so when it does, it's a nice surprise.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

When you think positive, good things happen.

I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.

If we're stuck with having expectations, there's a very good reason to embrace positive ones: It's that we often create what we anticipate.

I don't like to say anything good. I feel like I'll jinx myself.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.

We tend to get what we expect.

You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect.

Life is good when we think it's good. Life is bad when we don't think.

Anything that happens that's good, they think, Oh, it's an accident, when is the roof caving in? You've got to get them out of that mental framework.

I guess it's easier to think badly and then be pleasantly surprised.

I'm very realistic in my outlook on everything in life. When I look ahead in my mind to see what's going to happen next, I see the good and I see the bad.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

A man's as miserable as he thinks he is.