quotations about hope
The deepest dark reveals the starriest hope.
GERALD MASSEY
"Long Expected"
Hope is really just a variety of fear, all the more painful because it twitches a chance of escape in front of your nose as it slides by.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Hope in the Dark
Hope is the soul's best bower anchor let go in good holding ground. Through every trial, through every woe, in health, in sickness, in poverty, and in want, hope, like a bright fixed star of promise, shines aloft, and bids us not despair.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Hope", Short Essays
Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgment.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
BARACK OBAMA
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2009
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
Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it's the middle that counts the most. Try to remember that when you find yourself at a new beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up, and it will.
BIRDEE PRUITT
Hope Floats
Glittering hope is immemorial and beckons many men to their undoing.
EURIPEDES, Iphigenia in Tauris
There is always hope...only because it's the one thing that no one has figured out how to kill yet.
GALEN
Crusade
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
If it is hope that maintains and upholds faith and keeps it moving on, if it is hope that draws the believer into the life of love, then it will also be hope that is the mobilizing and driving force of faith's thinking, of its knowledge of, and reflections on, human nature, history and society. Faith hopes in order to know what it believes. Hence all its knowledge will be an anticipatory, fragmentary knowledge forming a prelude to the promised future, and as such is committed to hope. Hence also vice versa the hope which arises from faith in God's promise will become the ferment in our thinking, its mainspring, the source of its restlessness and torment.
JÜRGEN MOLTMANN
Theology of Hope
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
Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
But what is hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.
LORD BYRON
letter, Oct. 28, 1815
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
OUIDA
A Village Commune
Hope is the most universal of human possessions.
THALES
fragment
Hope is the best possession.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always To Be Blest.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man