Pessimism Quotes - Page 8

• The most common cause of low prices is pessimism - sometimes pervasive, sometimes specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces.

  Warren Buffett

  Business, Insightful, Causes

  Chairman's Letter to the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., www.berkshirehathaway.com. 1990.

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• Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Perfection, Defects, Humans

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2015). “On Human Nature: Top of Schopenhauer”, p.7, 谷月社

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• True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Men, Thinking, Expression

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2015). “Essays of Schopenhauer: Top Essays”, p.29, 谷月社

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• Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

  John Ortberg

  Church, Resistance, Cynicism

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• When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Country, Strong, Accepting

  "The cultural whipping boys' manifesto: France has vomited on us for too long" by Angelique Chrisafis, www.theguardian.com. October 2, 2008.

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• The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  People, Disease, Melancholy

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• I've always been sceptical about the notion that the market is a person you can engage in an argument with, and that that person is an intelligent, rational, well-intentioned person: it is fantasy. We know that ... the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and is vindictive ... You're dealing with a crazy man ... Having got what he wants he will still kill you.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Business, Crazy, Intelligent

  "The Money Man: Super-economist Joseph Stiglitz on how to fix the recession". Interview with Sean O'Grady, www.independent.co.uk. February 9, 2010.

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• A few modern philosopher's assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.... With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

  Alfred Binet

  Memories, Intelligent, Practice

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• I have lived through many wars and have lost everything many times Yet, life is beautiful, and I have so much to learn and enjoy. I have no space nor time for pessimism and hate.

  Alice Herz-Sommer

  Beautiful, Hate, War

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• Optimism, pessimism, f**k that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.

  Elon Musk

  Optimism, Hell, Bent

  "Now 0-for-3, SpaceX's Elon Musk Vows to Make Orbit". Interview with Carl Hoffman, www.wired.com. August 5, 2008.

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• We must not let ourselves fall into the vortex of pessimism. Faith can move mountains!

  Pope Francis

  Moving, Fall, Mountain

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• Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Action, Effects

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• It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.

  Aristotle

  Ignorance, Men, Self

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• Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is nessessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man's power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Life, Spring, Believe

  Richard Rodriguez (1993). “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father”, Penguin Group USA

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• PESSIMISM- philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Hope, Philosophy, Scarecrow

  Ambrose Bierce (2012). “The Devil's Dictionary”, p.93, Courier Corporation

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• When the worms are scarce, what does a hen do? Does she stop scratching? She does not. She scratches all the harder. A lot of businessmen have been showing less sense than a hen since orders became scarce. They have laid off salesmen; they have stopped or reduced their advertising; they have simply resigned themselves to inaction and, of course, to pessimism. If a hen knows enough to scratch all the harder when the worms are scarce, surely businessmen ... ought to have gumption enough to scratch all the harder for business.

  B. C. Forbes

  Perseverance, Order, Gumption

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• When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy.

  Warren Buffett

  Enemy, Investing, Financial

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• Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

  Emile Zola

  Fall, Men, Nurse

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• The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead In fact maybe there is a lesson there for how we should approach the future...with fourteen parts optimism - anticipating what could go right and the benefits - and one part pessimism - anticipating what could go wrong so we can avoid them.

  Robert Breault

  Average, Long, Optimism

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• Without [hope and] confidence in a cause, there is no action. Ignorance may be enlightened, superstition wiped out; intolerance may become tolerant, and hate be changed into love; ideas may be quickened, intelligence widened, and men's hearts may be ennobled; but from pessimism which can see nothing but gloomy visions nothing is to be expected.

  Klas Pontus Arnoldson

  Hate, Heart, Ignorance

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• [Never give up hope. Never give in to pessimism. Never despair.] No horse named Morbid ever won a race!

  Ernest Hemingway

  Horse, Giving Up, Race

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• Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.

  David Landes

  Wisdom, Eye, Optimism

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• The modern technological world appears overwhelming to many people. It drives some to pessimism and despair. It makes others doubt the future of mankind unless we retreat to simpler lives and even to the ways of our ancestors. What these people fail to realize is that we cannot go back to those ways and those days. Furthermore, for all our difficulties, life today is far better for more people and the possibilities for the future can be brighter than ever if we develop not only new knowledge, but a greater faith and confidence in the human mind and spirit.

  Glenn T. Seaborg

  People, Mind, Doubt

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• Invest at the point of maximum pessimism.

  John Templeton

  Maximum

  "World of Investing : The rewards of a long view" by James K. Glassman, International Herald Tribune, www.nytimes.com. April 24, 2004.

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• Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.

  Martin Seligman

  Depression, Achievement, News

  Martin Seligman (2011). “What You Can Change... and What You Can't”, p.17, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

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