Optimism

Optimism, the opposite of pessimism, exemplifies a lifeview where one looks upon the world as a positive place. Optimists generally believe that people and events are inherently good. They have a so-called "positive" outlook on life, believing that things will work out in the end.

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• Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you're going on a date.
  • Jacob M. Appel, playwright, Arborophilia

• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
  • James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion (1926)

• For myself I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
  • Winston Churchill, speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet, London, November 9, 1954

• Jerry boy, why do you have to paint everything so black? Suppose you got hit by a truck. Suppose the stock market crashes. Suppose Mary Pickford divorces Douglas Fairbanks. Suppose the Dodgers leave Brooklyn!
  • Some Like It Hot

• Always look on the bright side of life.
  • Eric Idle. Song written by Eric Idle for the film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

• Two men look out through the same bars:
  One sees the mud, and one the stars.
  • Frederick Langbridge (1849–1923), A Cluster of Quiet Thoughts

• Despite the cautions just raised, there is abundant reason to believe that optimism – big, little, and in between – is useful to a person because positive expectations can be self-fulfilling.
  • Christopher Peterson, American Psychologist, ISSN 0003-066X, January 2000, p. 51

• "Optimist" is a word which here refers to a person...who thinks pleasant thoughts about nearly everything. For instance, if an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well, this isn't too bad. I don't have my arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me if I am right-handed or left-handed", but most of us would say something more along the lines of "Aaaaah! My arm! My arm!"
  • Lemony Snicket, The Miserable Mill (2000)

• This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.
  • Nero Wolfe, in Fer-de-Lance (1934) by Rex Stout

• The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

• My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
  • Ellen Willis, "Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" (1977), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)

• The Doctor: Where's your joy in life? Where's your optimism?
  Romana: It opted out.
  • Doctor Who, "The Armageddon Factor", Episode One

• K9: Optimism: belief that everything will work out well. Irrational, bordering on insane.
  • Doctor Who, "The Armageddon Factor", Episode One