quotations about hope
A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope.
EPICTETUS
fragment
What doctor possesses such curative resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope?
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pictures; it weaves fancies; it fills the future with delight.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Hope is carefully to be distinguished, on the one hand from optimism (which springs from prediction of what the future will bring), and on the other hand from wishful thinking (which is unconstrained by the probabilities of what that future might bring). Hope is based neither on certainty, as if it were simply extrapolation of the present, nor on fantasy, as if its object bore only a tenuous relation to the present. Once again, we encounter the eschatological dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. In relation to hope, failure to respect this balance can lead either to despair that anything will ever change for the better, or to violent imaginings of apocalyptic destruction in which the future can be attained only by the annihilation of the past.
JOHN POLKINGHORNE
The God of Hope and the End of the World
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
LIN YUTANG
The Wisdom of China
For hope will cull a withered flower
And tune a harp with a broken string;
And hope will shed a glimmering ray
Of light on pleasure's ruined shrine.
For mouldering columns still look gay
When summer sunbeams o'er them shine.
ROSA VERTNER JEFFREY
"Hopes and Fears"
Hope is the destroyer of things.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
For Self-Examination
One day of good fortune is better than ten of hope.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Hope is a day the end of which we may never see.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The mind which renounces, once and forever, a futile hope, has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
GEORGE GISSING
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
Hope is, indeed, a deceitful enchantress; but she sheds a sweet radiance on the stream of life, and never exerts her magic except to our advantage. We seldom attain what she beckons us to pursue; but her deceptions resemble those which the dying husbandman in the fable practiced upon his sons, who, by telling them of a hidden mass of wealth, which he had buried in a secret place in his vineyard, led them so sedulously to delve the ground, and turn up the earth about the roots of the vines, that they found, in deed, a treasure, though not in gold, in wine.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
Hope is the beacon which points to prosperity.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
False hopes are more dangerous than fears.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Children of Hurin
Help, then, is the ballast that keeps us steady, that recognizes where along the path are the dangers and pitfalls that can throw us off; hope tempers fear so we can recognize dangers and then bypass or endure them.
JEROME GROOPMAN
The Anatomy of Hope
In hopelessness there is always hope.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Hope hath a large mouth.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Those that hope little cannot grow much.
GEORGE MACDONALD
The Hope of the Gospel
We watch our hopes, far flickering in the night,
Once radiant torches, lighted in our youth,
To guide, through years, to some broad morn of truth;
But these go out and leave us with no light.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska