99 Pessimism Quotes To Ponder

In a world often painted with optimism and hope, it's intriguing to explore the contrasting perspective of pessimism. This collection of 99 quotes delves into the depths of pessimistic thought, offering a chance to ponder the darker, yet profoundly realistic, aspects of life. Whether you're a firm believer in the glass-half-empty view or simply curious about the insights it provides, these carefully selected quotes will challenge your perceptions and inspire a deeper understanding of the human condition. Dive into this reflective journey and discover the wisdom hidden within the shadows of doubt and skepticism.

1. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.” - Thomas Friedman

3. “Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.” - Young-ha Kim

4. “You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.” - Chuck Palahniuk

5. “Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.” - William Butler Yeats

6. “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” - James Branch Cabell

7. “When things are at their blackest, I say to myself, 'Cheer up, things could be worse.' And sure enough, they get worse.” - Robert Asprin, editor

8. “Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral. ” - Robert Orben

9. “One can only tolerate the absolute idiocy of Man for so long before bringing out the bat.” - Dean Hale

10. “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

11. “No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse. (Apr 2007 Gen Conf)” - Jeffrey R. Holland

12. “If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.” - Philip K. Dick

13. “I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.” - P. G. Wodehouse

14. “Who gathers the withered rose?” - William Faulkner

15. “The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die.” - Ted Dekker

16. “School prepares you for the real world... which also bites.” - Jim Benton

17. “Life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.” - C.S. Lewis

18. “I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed.” - Tamar Myers

19. “It’s a tricky business, nurturing that aura of unapproachability.” - Dean Hale

20. “You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now?” - Jim Butcher

21. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” - William Butler Yeats

22. “It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.” - P.D. James

23. “Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.” - P.D. James

24. “This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.” - Raymond Carver

25. “And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.” - Peter Cameron

26. “If you expect the worst, you'll never be disappointed.” - Sarah Dessen

27. “If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?” - Arthur Schopenhauer

28. “We're all free and equal to die like dogs” - Peter Weiss

29. “Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference. ” - David Dellinger

30. “Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

31. “I wish to weepbut sorrow isstupid.I wish to believebut belief is agraveyard.” - Charles Bukowski

32. “If you reach for the stars, you just might land on a decently sized hill.” - Stuart Hill

33. “Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion.” - George Gissing

34. “What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing” - Willem Lange

35. “A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.” - George Bernard Shaw

36. “Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.” - Charlotte Brontë

37. “I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

38. “There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.” - Jules Renard

39. “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.” - Martin Keogh

40. “Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.” - Kingsley Amis

41. “If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.” - Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

42. “Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.” - Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

43. “...if you live feeling likeYour glass is half empty, well,It may as well be empty all the way.” - Mattie J.T. Stepanek

44. “Fuck you! I hope you die!""Everybody Dies," I said. "So fuck you.” - Lawrence Block

45. “But it's like no matter how much energy you pour into getting to the station on time, or getting on the right train, there's still no guarantee that anybody's gonna be there for you to pick you up when you get there.” - Nancy Oliver

46. “All you need, you think, is a breather, a few minutes standing up at the bar like in the old days, having a harmless bottle of beer. Only the bottle of beer isn't harmless; it's a trigger. It sets off that crazy thing in your mind that made you a dipso in the first place...” - Jonathan Craig

47. “Stain my eyes as I may, on all sides all is black.” - Helen Hunt Jackson

48. “I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane.It never is, sir.Lane, you're a perfect pessimist.I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.” - Oscar Wilde

49. “Se sou pessimista é porque o mundo é péssimo, só isso.” - José Saramago

50. “Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.” - Joyce Carol Oates

51. “The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.” - Thomas Ligotti

52. “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.” - Howard Zinn

53. “Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience"."What's pessimism?" I said."Religion without God.” - Jonathan Kellerman

54. “See the moon? It hates us.” - Donald Barthelme

55. “In my heart's most secret place,I pity them as angels do.” - Sara Teasdale

56. “This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?” - Marguerite Yourcenar

57. “The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.” - Pat Conroy

58. “Stop moping, sule," galladon said with a grunt."It doesn't suit you-it takes a fine sense of pessimism to brood with any sort of respectability.” - Brandon Sanderson

59. “Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism.” - Criss Jami

60. “I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.” - Criss Jami

61. “For you the cup isn't half full or half empty, you're always topping it up.” - Rowena Cory Daniells

62. “I'm beginning to think the only choice anyone has in life is between either a bad choice or a worse one.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

63. “The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

64. “‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.” - david benioff

65. “I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.” - G.K. Chesterton

66. “It is possible for things to get worse without limit.” - Dr. Herbert R.J. Grosch, U.S. National Bureau of Standards

67. “I like pessimists. They’re always the ones who bring life jackets for the boat.” - Lisa Kleypas

68. “What’s going on?” Royce asked as throngs of people suddenly moved toward him from the field and the castle interior.“I mentioned that you saw the thing and now they want to know what it looks like,” Hadrian explained. “What did you think? They were coming to lynch you?”He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-empty kinda guy.”“Half empty?” Hadrian chuckled. “Was there ever any drink in that glass?” - Michael J. Sullivan

69. “That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.” - david benioff

70. “But when nothing in your life happens in a positive frame, it is difficult to think positively and hope for the best.” - Faraaz Kazi

71. “Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.” - William Shakespeare

72. “People keep talking about this unfolding. I can't trust the unfolding, okay? If there is some higher power making origami out of the universe, it hates my guts. I was a fat kid whose parents got divorced, whose father died, and then who got cancer herself. So no. I don't trust how things are going to unfold.” - Wendy Wunder

73. “He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.” - Jack London

74. “My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it.” - Judy Nichols

75. “A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.” - Aldous Huxley

76. “Oh happy pessimists! What a joy it is to them to be able to prove again and again that there is no joy.” - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

77. “Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.” - Idries Shah

78. “I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.” - G.K. Chesterton

79. “تشاؤمُ العقل .. تفاؤلُ الإرادة” - Antonio Gramsci

80. “Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?” - Alan Moore

81. “What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.” - Voltaire

82. “If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.” - Emil Cioran

83. “When you've been struck by lightning as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time.” - Jennifer Bosworth

84. “Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.” - Ken Kesey

85. “However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is to get well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some purely morbid and exaggerated ill-humor. No special effort to overcome their feelings is necessary, nor do such people require to be worked up in order to take the step; but as soon as the keeper into whose charge they are given leaves them for a couple of minutes, they quickly bring their life to an end.When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

86. “Disappointment is really just a term for our refusal to look on the bright side.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

87. “So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.” - Shalom Auslander

88. “I think it's better if you rely on the fact you belong together, instead of having to reinvent your togetherness every day. People who say right off the bat that they don't want to take risks because their relationship is going to dissolve anyway - well, you might just as well split up right away. Why wait?” - Eva Heller

89. “Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.” - N.C. Thomas

90. “No sense in being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway.” - Cathie Linz

91. “It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.” - Gillian Flynn

92. “An egocentric pessimist is a person who thinks he hasn't changed, but that other people are behaving worse than before.” - Idries Shah

93. “How can you say that so casually? You're talking about the possible death of hundreds of people, yourself included."He gave a negligent shrug. "Wrong place, wrong time. Life sucks.” - shannon k. butcher

94. “For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have a unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings” - Thomas Ligotti

95. “It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty. I am gonna drink it through this crazy straw.” - Joey Comeau

96. “How does knowing 'things could be worse' than what I already deem awful make me feel any better? You mean I could sink even lower? Oh joy!” - Richelle E. Goodrich

97. “A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its "resting state" in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time.” - Dan Ariely

98. “Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?” - Émile Zola

99. “And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.” - Jeff Lindsay