Alain de Botton Quotes

For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human beings except as a misconception—that can compensate us for life’s hurt.

I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?

It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.

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.

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

We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.

I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.

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.

Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience". "What's pessimism?" I said. "Religion without God.

My pessimism has never been flabby.

I think we have every reason to hope for the best but expect and prepare for the worst.

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

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.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

I think that the vice president is a person reflecting a half-glass-full mentality.

Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair.

In life you have two choices. You can laugh or you can cry. You have to laugh, you have to.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

A spoonful of hope and a cup of despair

Positive thinking is how you think about a problem. Enthusiasm is how you feel about a problem. The two together determine what you do about a problem.

If you're running around with a negative attitude all the time, you're going to feel down, you're going to have negative results. But if you feel like you're going to make it through and you have positive thoughts, you have a much better chance to survive and be successful and happy.

Optimism is a seed sown in the soil of faith; pessimism is a seed hoarded in the vault of doubt.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimistic or pessimistic, but it is our optimism or pessimism of physiological or pathological origin that makes our ideas.

I think it's nice when everyone's happy. I'm that kind of person. But then sometimes you have people that are never happy, which also happened to me a little bit, people that always find ways to complain about everything. But if they're never happy, that's the way they are.