Allan K. Chalmers:

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Amartya Sen:

Reasoning is a robust source of hope in a world darkened by murky deeds.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Arundhati Roy:

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Barack Obama:

We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Barack Obama:

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. [January 3, 2008]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Christopher Reeve:

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.

Dale Carnegie:

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Don Quixote:

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Elie Wiesel:

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

Erik H. Erikson:

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.

George Bernard Shaw:

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Caesar and Cleopatra

Henri J. M. Nouwen:

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.

Henry Ward Beecher:

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Jane Wagner:

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Lin Yutang:

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.

Louisa May Alcott:

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow them.

Louise Bogan:

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

Margaret Fuller:

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

Marion Zimmer Bradley:

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

The Trumpet of Conscience

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Molly Ivins:

I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Pearl S. Buck:

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Pearl S. Buck:

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

Samuel Johnson:

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

Thomas Jefferson:

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

1816

Thomas Merton:

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Unknown:

Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack ran so we all can fly.

Will Durant:

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

William Penn:

Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgment.

Winston Churchill:

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.