- “You ought to mediate on the Scriptures daily.” ― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
- “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.” ― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts On Common Things
- “They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” ― Tom Bodett
- “The frightening assaults of pandemic terror have vastly increased our vulnerability. At the outset, hope and humor were able to alleviate the sabotage of our living together, until bit by bit, the raging roars and the thundering crashes of the death toll called the shots. The ground zero of our mental structure must inevitably make us remold another thinking pattern. (“What do they think behind their dirty aprons?” )” ― Erik Pevernagie
- “Dare the impossible. By grace it will be possible.” ― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
- “I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.” ― Craig D. Lounsbrough
- “We are changed forever. But the moments remain, in moth dust fallen from us, in firefly-light and flickering stars, in the monuments of our breathing, in smallnesses that become our mended bones.” ― Ian William L.
- “The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest— Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast.” ― William Wordsworth
- “Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.” ― Henry Rollins
- “I enjoy the thought of not having to rely on hope, but on the inconsistent, sometimes tangential unpredictability of human nature.” ― Matthew Tysz
- “Everything that looks good may not be good for you. In life, we all take chances. You must carefully examine the pros and cons. People often times have certain hidden agendas. And, you might not realize until you’re in too deep.” ― Amaka Imani Nkosazana, Sweet Destiny
- “You never really know what’s coming. A small wave, or maybe a big one. All you can really do is hope that when it comes, you can surf over it, instead of drown in its monstrosity.” ― Alysha Speer
- “The future is uncertain, but that can be a good thing.” ― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
- “Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world. There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. However—I could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we ‘die out.’ It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us for a day that was coming—for a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not for us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded—by their children’s murderers, after all—to cease having children.” ― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
- “Pray, Pray, Pray!” ― Lailah Gifty Akita
- “Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The more death, the more birth. People are entering, others are exiting. The cry of a baby, the mourning of others. When others cry, the other are laughing and making merry. The world is mingled with sadness, joy, happiness, anger, wealth, poverty, etc.” ― Michael Bassey Johnson
- “Let adversity reinforce your principles and values, not destroy them, hold on to them, like a strong tree holding on to the ground and his roots against the winds and tempest. The Storm will pass.” ― Lizzie Blazquez
- “Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.” ― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
- “The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.” ― Fernando Pessoa
- “Its dark and I’m reading my scars because our moments remind me of where I should be.” ― robert m drake
- Hope and change are hard-fought things. Michelle Obama
- “It’s too late, much too late, for us to be able to get the humans to accept wildness in its true form. We must go more gently. In the meantime, they will create more Barrens. They will take over more forest and destroy it. Someday, if the humans can accept the bit of the wild that will remain in our children’s children, they might indeed learn to accept the greater wild. We have to hope they do so before the world becomes a Barrens.” ― Dorothy Hearst, Spirit of the Wolves
- “The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.” ― Kalu Ndukwe Kalu
- “I would like [my readers] to better understand human beings and human life as a result of having read [my] stories. I’d like them to feel that this was an experience that made things better for them and an experience that gave them hope. I think that the kind of things that we talk about at this conference — fantasy very much so, science fiction, and even horror — the message that we’re sending is the reverse of the message sent by what is called “realistic fiction.” (I happen to think that realistic fiction is not, in fact, realistic, but that’s a side issue.) And what we are saying is that it doesn’t have to be like this: things can be different. Our society can be changed. Maybe it’s worse, maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s a higher civilization, maybe it’s a barbaric civilization. But it doesn’t have to be the way it is now. Things can change. And we’re also saying things can change for you in your life. Look at the difference between Severian the apprentice and Severian the Autarch [in The Book of the New Sun], for example. The difference beteween Silk as an augur and Silk as calde [in The Book of the Long Sun]. You see?We don’t always have to be this. There can be something else. We can stop doing the thing that we’re doing. Moms Mabley had a great line in some movie or other — she said, “You keep on doing what you been doing and you’re gonna keep on gettin’ what you been gettin’.” And we don’t have to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. We can do something else if we don’t like what we’re gettin’. I think a lot of the purpose of fiction ought to be to tell people that.” ― Gene Wolfe
- “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.” ― Isak Dinesen
- “Don’t be afraid of failures it takes courage to try new things & only those who try create History.” ― Abhishek Shukla, KISS Life “Life is what you make it”
- “Without enduring faith, how can we endure life?” ― Lailah Gifty Akita
- “Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.” ― Margaret Mitchell
- Hope is an embrace of the unknown. Rebecca Solnit