Echoes

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, of sickness, or captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable; nor does it appear that the happiest lot of terrestrial existence can set us above the want of this general blessing; or that life, when the gifts of nature and of fortune are accumulated upon it, would not still be wretched, were it not elevated and delighted by the expectation of some new possession, of some enjoyment yet behind, by which the wish shall at last be satisfied, and the heart filled up to its utmost extent.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

While I breathe, I hope.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

If you're afraid — don't do it. If you're doing it — don't be afraid.

Optimism is true moral courage.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

The quality I look for most is optimism: especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.

I felt before I thought: this is the common lot of humanity.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.

I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.