quotations about hope
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 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 waking dream.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy.
BIBLE
Proverbs 13:12
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
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
There is always hope...only because it's the one thing that no one has figured out how to kill yet.
GALEN
Crusade
The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
BARACK OBAMA
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2009
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
OUIDA
A Village Commune
Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.
JOHN GARDNER
In the Suicide Mountains
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 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
Hope is the most universal of human possessions.
THALES
fragment
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
Hope is the best possession.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Glittering hope is immemorial and beckons many men to their undoing.
EURIPEDES, Iphigenia in Tauris
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
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
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Conversations with Goethe