1. Hope is a waking dream.
- Aristotle
2. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
- Bil Keane
3. It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
- Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
4. Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
- Emily Dickinson
5. You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
- William Faulkner
6. Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
7. The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.
- Barack Obama
8. There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen
9. I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.
- Nelson Mandela
10. Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
- Stephen King
11. TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
- Howard Zinn
12. Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
- G.K. Chesterton
13. When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on
- Theodore Roosevelt
14. Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be...
- William Wordsworth
15. I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all.
- Abraham Lincoln
16. If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
- Henry David Thoreau
17. Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
- Albert Camus
18. Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy
19. Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.
- Chris Hedges
20. Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.
- Kahlil Gibran
21. Hope costs nothing.
- Colette
22. Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
- Albert Camus
23. People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
- Flannery O'Connor
24. You can't eat hope,' the woman said.
You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.
- Gabriel García Márquez
25. Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
- Anton Chekhov
26. To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
- Audrey Hepburn
27. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
- Joyce Carol Oates
28. In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...
- Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
29. The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
- Alain de Botton
30. What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
31. Carry the fire.
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
32. One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
- Voltaire
33. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
34. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
- Oliver Sacks
35. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.
- Albert Pike
36. Remember, happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.
- Dale Carnegie
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