Unbridled Optimism Quotes

You know when you're young, you have this unbelievable stupidity and arrogance and ignorance all mixed in?

Being young isn't about age, it's about being a free spirit. You can meet someone of 20 who's boring and old, or you can meet someone of 70 who's youthful and exciting. I met Fred Astaire when he was 72 and I was 21, and I fell in love with him. He certainly was a free spirit.

I'd like to live permanently in October 1988, when I started college. I had no responsibility and the energy to do whatever I wanted. My optimism wasn't dented by experience or low self-esteem.

We are under no delusions as to the innate goodness even of very small children. They are bad a great deal of the time, but before it has been knocked out of them, they see no limit to the potentialities of the human will. Theirs is the faith to move mountains, because they do not yet know the fearful heft of them.

I've never been too afraid of what other people have said, especially when I was younger, but I suppose that was the arrogance of youth.

I have not changed; I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily.

I will not forget: that we were a flame and they doused us with water.

I felt like an extraordinary hero. I was only five or six and I had the whole of life in my hands. Even if I had been driving the carriage of the sun I could not have felt any better.

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.

I think my inner child wants to take over the world.

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.

The single most powerful element of youth is that you don't have the life experiences to know what can't be done.

These carefree young Americans were freedom incarnate: our own and also the freedom that was about to spread – we had no doubts on this score – throughout world.

Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?

Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious.

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.

A young dog's faith is absolute... Dogs are notorious for hope. Dogs believe that this morning, this very morning, may begin a day of fascination, easily grander than any day in the past.

If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.

Of all spells that could be cast on a nation, that of believing itself invincible was perhaps the one most profitable broken …

I don't think I'm unusual in that, in my 20s, like many people, I felt invincible.

Inexperience is what makes a young man do what an older man says is impossible.

I really feel like the sky is the limit with the Innocent Criminals today.

My family believed I could do no wrong. That's probably why I have utter confidence in myself even when I shouldn't have.

This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.

We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.