HOPE QUOTES III
quotations about hope
What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
DAVID MAMET
Speed-the-Plow
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always To Be Blest.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
There is always hope...only because it's the one thing that no one has figured out how to kill yet.
GALEN
Crusade
A man begins to die when he ceases to expect anything from Tomorrow.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
But what is hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.
LORD BYRON
letter, Oct. 28, 1815
He who has never hoped can never despair.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Caesar and Cleopatra
Hope is a waking dream.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Human
A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
ANN PATCHETT
State of Wonder
Hope is really just a variety of fear, all the more painful because it twitches a chance of escape in front of your nose as it slides by.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Hope in the Dark
The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
BARACK OBAMA
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2009
Hope is the most universal of human possessions.
THALES
fragment
Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today--with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jan. 3, 2008
How can hope be false when it is as much a part of the human experience as birth or death?
LORI HOPE
Help Me Live
Men of warm imaginations and towering thoughts are apt to overlook the goods of fortune which are near them, for something that glitters in the sight at a distance; to neglect solid and substantial happiness for what is showy and superficial; and to contemn that good which lies within their reach, for that which they are not capable of attaining. Hope calculates its schemes for a long and durable life; presses forward to imaginary points of bliss; grasps at impossibilities; and consequently very often ensnares men into beggary, ruin, and dishonour.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Nov. 13, 1712
Hope is the soul's best bower anchor let go in good holding ground. Through every trial, through every woe, in health, in sickness, in poverty, and in want, hope, like a bright fixed star of promise, shines aloft, and bids us not despair.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Hope", Short Essays