Wisdom Quotations

Hope

Allan K. Chalmers:
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Dale Carnegie:
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Dorothy Thompson:
Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Dorothy Thompson:
Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Elie Wiesel:
I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historial answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Friedrich Nietzsche:
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.

George Bernard Shaw:
He who has never hoped can never despair.

Caesar and Cleopatra

Henry Ward Beecher:
Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Jane Wagner:
A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

Kalidasa:
Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Louisa May Alcott:
Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow them.

Margaret Fuller:
I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

Martin Luther King, jr.:
If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

The Trumpet of Conscience

Mohandas K. Gandhi:
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Molly Ivins:
I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

Patricia Hampl:
The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Pearl S. Buck:
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Pearl S. Buck:
To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Rita Mae Brown:
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Thomas Jefferson:
I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

1816

Winston Churchill:
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty