quotations about hope
With thee, sweet Hope! resides the heav'nly light,
That pours remotest rapture on the sight:
Thine is the charm of life's bewilder'd way,
That calls each slumb'ring passion into play:
Wak'd by thy touch, I see the sister band,
On tiptoe watching, start at thy command,
And fly where'er thy mandate bids them steer,
To Pleasure's path, or Glory's bright career.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
The Pleasures of Hope
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
The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
BARACK OBAMA
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2009
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
Hope deceives more men than cunning can.
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflecions et Maximes
What is hope but a feeling of optimism, a thought that says things will improve, it won't always be bleak, there's a way to rise above the present circumstances. Hope is an internal awareness that you do not have to suffer forever, and that somehow, somewhere there is a remedy for despair that you will come upon if you can only maintain this expectancy in your heart.
WAYNE W. DYER
There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem
Hope is the shadow of faith.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Hope is a pickpocket with both fists full.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Where there is no hope there can be no endeavour.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Human
There is always hope...only because it's the one thing that no one has figured out how to kill yet.
GALEN
Crusade
Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see--in the mind's eye--a path to a better future.
JEROME GROOPMAN
The Anatomy of Hope
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
Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
SAMUEL SMILES
Self-Help
A man begins to die when he ceases to expect anything from Tomorrow.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always To Be Blest.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
DAVID MAMET
Speed-the-Plow
Glittering hope is immemorial and beckons many men to their undoing.
EURIPEDES, Iphigenia in Tauris
He who has never hoped can never despair.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Caesar and Cleopatra
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