Diminished Expectations Quotes

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.

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

Young people who have no future will easily give up their future, which they can't see on the horizon.

How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy.

I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.

Not being optimistic falls a long way short of predicting that all is finished.

I have written about cultural dislocation, and I understand the corrosive effect of diminished expectations.

Pessimism drops the curtain on tomorrow.

The response you get when you're young like "oh you're just getting laughs because you're a little kid and you're cute". They weren't trying to encourage me at all or tell me to keep pursuing this.

As in everything else, I find that age is not good for much, that one becomes deafer and less sensitive. Also, the higher up the mountain you climb, the less of a view you get. A mist closes in and cheats you of the hoped-for and expected opportunity to see far and wide.

Pessimism has never done anything but tear down and destroy what optimism has built up.

I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

I'm not really one of these people who's been known for particularly hopeful sentiments.

I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.