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1 " Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy. "
― H.P. Lovecraft
2 " The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. "
― George F. Will
3 " There is a very thin line of difference between a Pessimist and a Perfectionist. Both are scared to fail, strive for ideal but the only think unlike in the two is- Pessimist thinks it will last forever and Perfectionist knows it won't. "
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber
4 " I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. "
― Antonio Gramsci , Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters
5 " An optimist sees a failure as an opportunity to excel, but a pessimist sees a failure as an opportunity to quit. "
― Debasish Mridha
6 " You're the optimist all the way through, pretending to be a pessimist on the inside, because you can act like it hurts less if you say you knew all along it was going to go down like that. "
7 " Thunder is noise to a pessimist but music to an optimist. "
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8 " One can be a pessimist in thought but not in action. "
9 " But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, " You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge's," or " You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth's." Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, " Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions," or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, " What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?" we are to say like the discontented cabman, " What's this?" or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, " Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?" Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair. This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them. "
10 " The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much "
11 " I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed. "
― Tamar Myers , As the World Churns (Pennsylvania Dutch Mystery, #16)
12 " Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information. "
― Idries Shah , Reflections
13 " What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide." That is because I know what life is," said Martin. "
14 " When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens. "
― Michael Lewis , The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
15 " When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. " Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens. "
16 " I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. "
― James Baldwin
17 " The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she'd the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn't have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world. "
― Paul Auster , Timbuktu
18 " In the Soviet Union we have a saying, a pessimist is someone who believes things can't get any worse. An optimist thinks maybe they can. "
19 " Know what an optimist is, Major? A pessimist without much experience. "
20 " Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" " I can't remember. Which?" " Do you know what those words mean?" " Not really." " An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical." " I'm an optimist." " Well, that's good, because there’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to. "