Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt
In the few years since I’ve started to travel this world, I’ve found myself changing. The cramped cynical worldview of a man who’d only seen life through the narrow prism of the restaurant kitchen had altered. I’d been so many places, I’d met so many people from wildly divergent backgrounds, countries, and cultures.
Everywhere I’d been, I’d been, as in Beruit, treated so well. I’d been the recipient of so many random acts of kindness from strangers and I’d begun to think that no matter where I went or who I sat down with, that food and a few drinks seemed always to bring people together. That this planet was filled with basically good and decent people doing the best they could, if frequently under difficult circumstances. That the human animal was perhaps a better and nicer species than I had once thought.
I’d begun to believe that the dinner table was the great leveler, where people from opposite sides of the world could always sit down and talk and eat and drink and if not solve all the worlds problems, at least find, for a time, common ground.
Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe the world’s not like that at all. Maybe in the real world—the one without cameras and happy food and travel shows—everybody, the good and the bad together, are all crushed under some terrible wheel.
I hope, I really hope, that I’m wrong about that.
—Anthony Bourdain
Really to live requires a great deal of love, a great feeling for silence, a great simplicity with an abundance of experience; it requires a mind that is capable of thinking very clearly, that is not bound by prejudice or superstition, by hope or fear.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
—Helen Keller in Optimism
No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
—Dorothy Day
Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.
—Gail Devers
John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This helps explain why American culture is so hostile to the idea of limits, why voters during the last energy shortage rejected the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan who told them it was still "morning in America." Nowhere does the myth of progress have more fervent believers.
—Ronald Wright
Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
—Thomas Carlyle
Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.
—Lillian Hellman
Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
—Jim Horning
Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
—James Thurber
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.
—Robert A. Heinlein
If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
—Thomas Fuller