Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

God has given us two hands, one to receive with and the other to give with.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

I think there’s every reason this 21st century will be much happier.

Desire is the very essence of man.

Over the years, I had nurtured the hope to be able to fly; to handle a machine as it rose higher and higher in the stratosphere was my dearest dream.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‚There’s nothing good in my future‘ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

Mr. T. been to chemo, Mr. T been to radiation, hair fall out… but he’s back. Now I can give hope when I go to the hospital, see the sick kids with cancer, tell them, don’t quit.

I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

How sweet it is to learn the Savior’s love when nobody else loves us! When friends flee, what a blessed thing it is to see that the Savior does not forsake us but still keeps us and holds us fast and clings to us and will not let us go!

Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Luck is believing you’re lucky.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

We want justice, but at the same time, we gotta love and come together and bring unity, and I feel it’s gonna happen.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

It was something I never expected to – I never expected the book would sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Man gives you the award but God gives you the reward.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.