Seneca the Younger Quotes

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

The worse that could happen has already happened to me.

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

Let whatever is going to happen to me happen. I'm expecting the worst for myself and I'm resigned to it.

I'm completely optimistic - I know the end is coming!

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

Hopelessness has surprised me with patience.

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

I didn't want to accept that people would forget me, that the government wouldn't do anything to negotiate our freedom. After a year, I came to understand that not only had one year passed, many more would come.

Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation.

Despair is vinegar from the wine of hope.

We have no hope and yet we live in longing.

The miserable have no other medicine But only hope.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb--that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully... which only reinforces that particular Lie.

My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties.

By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

Also, it was a bit hopeless," he said. "A bit defeatist." "If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree." "I don't think defeatism is honest, " Dad answered. "I refuse to accept that.

He who has never hoped can never despair

We don't have to convince people how screwed they are.

If we lose our hope, that's our real disaster!

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.