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| Optimism is a kind of heart stimulus, the digitalis of failure. | | Elbert Hubbard | |
| Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress. | | Nicholas Murray Butler | |
| Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. | | Helen Keller | |
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| Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. ... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious. | | Ambrose Bierce | |
| Optimist: Day-dreamer more elegantly spelled | | Mark Twain | |
| Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness | | Mark Twain | |
| Our degeneration, when it is traced back to its origin in our view of the world really consists in the fact that true optimism has vanished unperceived from our midst. | | Albert Schweitzer | |
| People grow old only by deserting their ideals, Macarthur had written. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old. And then, indeed as the ballad says, you just fade away. | | Douglas MacArthur | |
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| Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists | | Mark Twain | |
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| The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little | | Mark Twain | |
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| The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose | | Kahlil Gibran | |
| The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true. | | J. Robert Oppenheimer | |
| The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. | | Winston Churchill | |
| The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum | | Havelock Ellis | |
| The point of living and of being an optimist is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come. | | Peter Ustinov | |
