quotations about hope
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Conversations with Goethe
Though Hope be a small child, she can carry a great anchor!
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Last of the Barons
Hope is like a northern hawthorn bush, late flowering but continuing long in bloom. There is an element of speculation in it which faith quite lacks. Thus, faith is for youth, hope for middle life, and charity, which only comes when faith and hope are dead, for age.
B. CUNNINGHAM GRAHAM
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
Blind hope faces a blank wall waiting for a door in it to open. Doors might be nearby, but blind hope keeps you from locating them.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Hope in the Dark
We should expect hope's reciprocity as a natural flowering of the life of hope. Helping others and nurturing hope is expressive of hopefulness itself. It is an extension of the hopeful self to reach out to others, promoting the connection of agency and the enrichment of horizons of meaning. Hope's reciprocity grows out of the very social nature of hope; we thus frequently see it live in family relations, in intimacy, in love. And so hope spreads. This spreading should not surprise us; like love, it is freely given, fostered, and nurtured.
PATRIC SHADE
Habits of Hope
Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
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 the most universal of human possessions.
THALES
fragment
At home or abroad, on land, on sea, in prosperity or in adversity, hope's beaming star ever lights us, sometimes feeble, but oftener bright; sometimes weak, but oftener strong. Hope is the murderer's cell, and with the shipwrecked mariner on the desert isle; in the palace, and in the cot; it is shining with surpassing splendour by the dying bed of the Christian, and flickering round the couch of the infidel. Hope met our first parents in Eden, and will be with the last man on earth. Hope is part of our immortality; we hope on, and we hope ever.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Hope", Short Essays
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
The deepest dark reveals the starriest hope.
GERALD MASSEY
"Long Expected"
We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
DAVID MAMET
Speed-the-Plow
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 never abandons you; you abandon it.
GEORGE WEINBERG
Self Creation
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
A man begins to die when he ceases to expect anything from Tomorrow.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
He who has never hoped can never despair.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Caesar and Cleopatra
To the last moment of his breath
On hope the wretch relies;
And e'en the pang preceding death
Bids expectation rise.
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Captivity