Paul Simon Quotes

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

I think I'm optimistic, yeah, especially in real life, but I think it's funny to be pessimistic.

Better to be an optimist who gets disappointed than a pessimist who has no hope.

All my life, Following Care along the dusty road, Have I looked back on loveliness and sighed.

An optimist in Canada is someone who think things could be worse

I felt more alone that week than any. Sometimes I'd feel a body lying next to me like an amputee feels a phantom limb. All I did was think about Jennie Gerhardt and Alice Quinn and all the decades of people I had known. The more I thought, the more I felt like crying. Life seemed so sweet and so sad, and so hard to let go of in the end. But hey, man, every day is a brand new deal, right? Just keep on working and something's bound to turn up.

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.

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

I'm an eternal optimist.

No matter what, I've always been an optimistic person.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.

I am guilty of the great crime of optimism.

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more - Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

I laughed. “You’re too young to be so … pessimistic,” I said, using the English word. “Pessi-what?” “Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.” “Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

I try to count the blessings rather than the problems.

I understand that being optimistic in this age is challenging, but I am optimistic nonetheless.

Everyday is a good day, just some days are better

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.