F. H. Bradley Quotes

I have friends who are very pessimistic. They say you can't possibly be an optimist nowadays. But I think, taking the longer view, you can still be as optimistic as you want.

I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.

I don't have a Pollyana attitude toward life that claims everything is lovely.

I remember getting notified that I won an award, and I gloated up a storm to my mother, and I was so obnoxious about it, but I said to her, 'Momma, I'm going to enjoy every moment of this because tomorrow, something bad is going to happen.'

It's important to not be naive about this world and know that it's not necessarily a good place to be.

Whenever you looked forward to anything pleasant you were sure to be more or less disappointed . . . perhaps that is true. But there is a good side to it too. The bad things don't always come up to your expectations either . . . they nearly always turn out ever so much better than you think.

One cannot afford to be a realist.

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.

An optimist is the person who has never had any experience at all.

A lot of stuff is dark in a way, but unless you're really looking at a situation for what it actually is, it's hard to be hopeful - or meaningless to be hopeful about it unless it's actually based in a real possibility.

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

Sure, there are many bad things that can happen. Yet you can be aware of them, and realistic about them, without being obsessed and consumed by them.

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

That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

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 know, he said. We are into the Bad Idea neighborhood and heading down I Have a Bad Feeling Street. (Shane)

I am by nature a worried optimist.

And that was the way The deuce was to pay As it always is, at the close of the day That gave us

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

I see the glass half full...but of poison.

I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.

But you have to remember in life that there's a positive to every negative and a negative to every positive.

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

On one hand, I'm an optimistic pessimist. On the other, I'm a pessimistic optimist. But while there's life, there's still hope, and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't think there was still hope.

All information is good, even when it is bad.