Neal A. Maxwell Quotes

A spoonful of hope and a cup of despair

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

As I have discovered again and again, things are never as bad (or as good) as they seem at the time.

As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better." "Or worse," said Liraz. "Yes," he conceded. "Usually worse." Hazael cut in. "My sister, Sunshine, and my brother, Light. You two should rally the ranks. You'll have us killing ourselves by morning.

Things are never as bad or as good as they seem.

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.

Be of good cheer. The future is as bright as your faith.

I'm cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I'm not cynical about life, love, goodness, death. That's why I really don't want to be labeled a cynic.

I wouldn't say 'most' people are prone to negativity. I think it's probably that most people allow negativity to color their thinking, depending on circumstances, but I also believe most people make the necessary efforts to return to positive thinking as quickly as possible.

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?

Every breath is a battle between grudgery and gratitude. Give thanks...and you win joy.

Good cheer is a state of mind or mood that promotes happiness or joy... With God’s help, good cheer permits us to rise above the depressing present or difficult circumstances. It is a process of positive reassurance and reinforcement. It is sunshine when clouds block the light.

You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.

I believe in courtesy, in kindness, in generosity, in good cheer, in friendship and in honest competition. I believe there is something doing somewhere, for every man ready to do it. I believe I'm ready, RIGHT NOW.

Life catches you by surprise. It always does. But there's good mixed in with the bad. It's there. You just have to recognize it.

To face life without hope can mean to live without despair.

The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.

If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty.

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.

I believe that there's a cloud for every silver lining,' I said.

Being a pessimist is just such a gloomy way of looking at things, so I have to hope for the best - life wouldn't be worth living if we didn't have hope. And I also do think that human beings often do do wonderful, correct, brilliant things. So, on balance, I'd like to be optimistic about the future.

A lot of Americans like happy endings, but life does not necessarily have a happy ending.

I want to believe that happiness might at least be possible later on in life for people prone to sadness.